Parser inconsistency, inside/outside of block

Here's a strange one raised on ruby-talk:247831

It looks like the parser works differently inside and outside of blocks,
when dealing with spaces between method names and argument lists.

$ cat x.rb
x = 3
puts (x-5).abs

1.times do
  puts (x-5).abs
end

$ ruby -v
ruby 1.8.4 (2005-12-24) [i486-linux]
$ ruby x.rb
x.rb:5: warning: don't put space before argument parentheses
2
-2
x.rb:5: undefined method `abs' for nil:NilClass (NoMethodError)
        from x.rb:4
$

So "puts (x-5).abs" works in line 2, but not in line 5 :-(

Regards,

Brian.