This is also kind-of a reply to tye's (valid) point. The file doesn't have any HTML entities. Here's the top lines of what od says about the file (I have cygwin on the Win 2K machine):

0000000   u   s   e       s   t   r   i   c   t   ;  \r  \n   u   s   
+e
0000020       w   a   r   n   i   n   g   s   ;  \r  \n   u   s   e
0000040   u   t   f   8   ;  \r  \n  \r  \n   m   y       $ 316 261   
+=
0000060       5   ;  \r  \n   m   y       $ 316 246   =       4   ;  \
+r
[download]

Note the variable names look like two octal bytes. So I suspect tye's right: I still don't have exactly what John entered, but what I did have worked as expected.

Also, I tried it with and without strict. With strict I get the expected:

> perl -w ca21hp4a.pl
Global symbol "$╬▒" requires explicit package name at ca21hp4a.pl line 5.
Execution of ca21hp4a.pl aborted due to compilation errors.

I had to use <pre> tags instead of <code> tags in the above snippet to make those characters show up, although they still got turned into HTML entities.

Waah, this encoding stuff is too confusing.