This scares me enough to always put parens around function calls

You know what's really scary? Depending on how you place your parens, that might not save you. Say you want to call a method (does the new rule count for subroutine calls as well?) which takes an argument, and add 1 to the result. Just like in Perl5, you use parens:

    obj.method ($arg) + 1;
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In that case, you might as well have not put the parens there - it's equivalent to:

    obj.method ($arg + 1);
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If you want to be save, and not depend on unnatural (unnatural in the sense that all major programming languages I know don't have their expressions change meaning depending whether there's a space before an opening paren or not) whitespace rules you have to use an extra set of parens:

   (obj.method ($arg)) + 1;
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Abigail