FYI, when you use multi-line regular expression syntax, watch closely for proper termination of the regex. (A Perl-sensitive text editor with color highlighting is hugely helpful here.) If Perl fails to catch the proper end-of-expression, due to a syntax error on your part (however slight), it can try to treat the rest of the program source-code as part of it, leading sometimes to “bogosities” like this where it runs out of resources before it figures out what it is doing (wrong). But, since this appears (so they say) to be limited to a particular version of Perl, it is indeed probably just-a-bug.
