Note that you can bypass the whole use statement by using -E:

perl -E 'say ((localtime)[1])'
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However, in one of the examples of intermediate perl there is a section in the package that don't use surrounding circular braces. Any idea why ?
See below code its working fine with out any braces surrounding the list, does it have to do anything with the return?

{
package MyDate;
use vars qw($AUTOLOAD);

use Carp;

my %Allowed_methods = qw( date 3 month 4 year 5 );
my @Offsets = qw(0 0 0 0 1 1900 0 0 0);

sub new { bless {}, $_[0] }
sub DESTROY {}

sub AUTOLOAD {
my $method = $AUTOLOAD;
$method =~ s/.*:://;
unless( exists $Allowed_methods{ $method } ) {
carp "Unknown method: $AUTOLOAD";
return;
}


my $slice_index = $Allowed_methods{ $method };

return (localtime)[$slice_index] + $Offsets[$slice_index];
}
}

MyDate->import; # we don't use it
my $date = MyDate->new();

print "The date is " . $date->date . "\n";
print "The month is " . $date->month . "\n";
print "The year is " . $date->year . "\n";
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This is because when using print or say, there is ambiguity in what you're passing. Without the parens:

perl -w -E 'say (localtime)[1]'
say (...) interpreted as function at -e line 1.
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say like print are both functions. perl just makes it convenient that you can omit a function's parens in most situations. say believes that the opening parens belongs to itself, like this: say( localtime )[1] ;, which is wrong. So if you look at it like this: say( (localtime)[1] );, it may become clearer as to what's happening. In most other cases, you can eliminate the parens:

my $x = (localtime)[1];
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or

return (localtime)[1];
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@stevieb, thank you very much for the clear explanation. Its clear to me now!

Raghu.