permission denied

[Ray Andrews <rayandrews@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

So, now having my 'chain' variable and experimenting with using it as a 
command, I run into this problem with any of my functions, like 'l' here:

 % chain=( ls ); $chain

... OK as expected

 % chain=( l ); $chain

zsh: permission denied: l

 % chain=( l ); eval $chain

... works fine.

It seems strange that a perfectly usable function throws 'permission 
denied' used that way.  IIRC there are times when that message is 
misleading, it's not really a permissions issue but something else.  I 
vaguely recall crashing into this before but I can't remember what the  
real reason was.  And why does 'eval' fix it?