split problem

rmarkman has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Perl 5, version 22, subversion 0 (v5.22.0) built for MSWin32-x64-multi-thread gives this error

Modification of a read-only value attempted at test.plx line 6.

With this program:

use strict;
my $value = "A\tB\tC\tD\tE\tF\t\t\t\t";
my @flds;
@flds = split(/\t/,$value);
$flds[16] = undef;
$flds[8] = 0;
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No error is generated if any of: eliminate the trailing tabs in $value; eliminate the call to split; call split with a -1 limit. I am mystified.