in reply to Strange Observation [SOLVED]

Other observations...

Tip #6 from the Basic debugging checklist: B::Deparse. The line parses as:

say zip 'ABCDEFGHIJ', 'abcde';

If I remove the space between zip and the paren:

say zip('ABCDEFGHIJ','abcde');

the warning goes away, I get the expected output, and it parses differently:

say zip('ABCDEFGHIJ', 'abcde');