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.