Straight from perldoc perlre:
Warning on \1 vs $1
Some people get too used to writing
things like:$pattern =~ s/(\W)/\\\1/g;
This is grandfathered for the RHS of a
substitute to avoid shocking the sed
addicts, but it’s a dirty habit to get
into. That’s because in PerlThink,
the righthand side of an “s///” is a
double- quoted string. “\1” in the
usual double-quoted string means a
control-A. The customary Unix meaning
of “\1” is kludged in for “s///”.
However, if you get into the habit of
doing that, you get yourself into
trouble if you then add an “/e”
modifier.s/(\d+)/ \1 + 1 /eg; # causes warning under -w
Or if you try to do
s/(\d+)/\1000/;
You can’t disambiguate that by saying
“{1}000”, whereas you can fix it with
“${1}000”. The operation of
interpolation should not be confused
with the operation of matching a
backreference.Certainly they mean two different
things on the left side of the “s///”.