I have been trying a few variants and in addition to the "flip flop complication" I also got interference with print interpreting the parantheses as the function call operator.

my $x = ( 1 .. 5 );           # scalar context, flip flop
print "$x <= 1\n";            # " <= 1\n" as $x is empty string
print ( 1 .. 5 ), " <= 2\n";  # "12345" but no " <= 2\n", ( ) consumed
+ by print
print +( 1 .. 5 ), " <= 3\n"; # "12345 <= 3\n"
my $y = () = ( 1 .. 5 );      # enforces list context but then assigne
+d to scalar
print "$y <= 4\n";            # "5 <= 4\n"
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