If the declaration is not followed by an assignment, it is purely (un)aesthetic. If there is an assignment, the difference is important - the parentheses introduce list context on the rvalue. For example:

$_='....x....x....x...';
my $scalar = /x/g;
my ($list) = /x/g;
print $scalar, "\t", $list, ".\n";
[download]

Output:

1       x.
[download]

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