perldiag: \%d better written as $%d
splain can’t necessarily find it if we hard-code the number:
$ ./perl -Ilib -Mdiagnostics -we '()="" =~ s/()()/\1/r'
\1 better written as $1 at -e line 1 (#1)
(W syntax) Outside of patterns, backreferences live on as variables.
The use of backslashes is grandfathered on the right-hand side of a
substitution, but stylistically it's better to use the variable form
because other Perl programmers will expect it, and it works better if
there are more than 9 backreferences.
$ ./perl -Ilib -Mdiagnostics -we '()="" =~ s/()()/\2/r'
\2 better written as $2 at -e line 1.
$
%d is more intuitive than %c here, so I used %d in the pod instead of
copying the C code that generates it.