Good point about the older versions of perl, but you'll only have to resort to the uglier (IMHO) syntax you describe if your code needs to run on perl 5.003 or earlier. The $coderef->(PARAMS) syntax was introduced in perl 5.004.

http://www.perldoc.com/perl5.8.0/pod/perl5004delta.html#New-and-changed-syntax

Thanks to tye and davido for doc links.