I agree, writing print Mymod::mysub (); will look like an indirect object per the node you refered to. But why does print (Mymod::sub ()); that is, with parens around it, do the same thing? That is the question I was asking.

Parenthesis have nothing to do with it because of the way the Perl grammar is defined. From perly.y:

LSTOP indirob argexpr          /* print $fh @args */
FUNC '(' indirob expr ')'      /* print ($fh @args */
LSTOP listexpr                 /* print @args */
FUNC '(' listexprcom ')'       /* print (@args) */
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Looks like a typo in the second line, too.

I'm not sure I agree that this is an "indirect object", though. It looks like the parser's trying to convert anything that looks like a filehandle into a filehandle.

FUNC '(' indirob expr ')'      /* print ($fh @args */
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Hmm, so it specifically allows parens there! I had no idea--I thought they would defeat this way of parsing.

Also, is print special? I don't recall foo (bar (5)); ever trying to call bar->foo(5) instead.

Is that why you don't agree that indirob is the right characterization for it?

—John

Ah, guess we we're talking about the same thing... I got confused when you said:

I can see that scanfile will see that it was called with "wantarray" But why does print think that's an indirect object...

But scanfile doesn't get treated as a subroutine at all, so I didn't understand where wantarrray comes in to play. See the second stanza below for what I thought you meant by indirect object...

I don't have an answer for you, but I have yet to find a print statement that Deparses differently depending on the outer parens. I think it might be a red herring, which is why I left them off in my previous example.

% perl -MO=Deparse -e 'print abc'
     print abc $_;
% perl -MO=Deparse -e 'print(abc)'
     print abc $_;

# when you said 'indirect object' I thought this was
# what you thought was going on....
% perl -MO=Deparse -e 'print abc def'
     print 'def'->abc;
% perl -MO=Deparse -e 'print(abc def)'
     print 'def'->abc;

% perl -MO=Deparse -e 'open abc; print abc def'
     open abc;
     print abc 'def';
% perl -MO=Deparse -e 'open abc; print(abc def)'
     open abc;
     print abc 'def';

% perl -MO=Deparse -e 'print abc:: def'
     print abc 'def';
% perl -MO=Deparse -e 'print(abc:: def)'
     print abc 'def';

% perl -MO=Deparse -e 'print abc:: ()'
     print abc ();
% perl -MO=Deparse -e 'print(abc:: ())'
     print abc ();

% perl -MO=Deparse -e 'print abc::def ()'
     print abc::def ();
% perl -MO=Deparse -e 'print(abc::def ())'
     print abc::def ();
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-Blake