I think the issue that is resolved has to do with my original assessment:

What I think happens is that the parser gets confused with trying to handle the:

 
 -key => value
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notation.

The warning does not occur when you have "-foo()" because the parentheses indicated a subroutine call. However, without it, "-foo" could still be a key specification. So the parser must take that into account after parsing -foo. Then it hits the ";" and it can resolve the issue. Although in this case strictly speaking, I don't see an ambiguity. So the warning seems superfluous to me.

I guess a p5per with more perl internals knowledge should speak up ;-)

Liz