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