I can't seem to be able to reply to other replies (too much nesting probably). Perhaps I'll try the chatterbox or a separate question.

I was trying to understand if the Perl compiler parses "f ($_)" in "map f ($_), @numbers" as a lambda. If it's not a block, but an expression, it must be either an arithmetic expression, a lambda expression etc. My question was from a syntactic/compiler point of view.

And as to eager evaluation, obviously this is a counterexample, since map f($_) @nums doesn't immediately, eagerly evaluate f on the current $_, but instead passed a lambda to map()