What's going on here? ... What is the difference between parentheses absent and parentheses present?

As others have said: context. Please see Tutorials->Context in Perl->Context tutorial right here on the premises.

Give a man a fish:  <%-(-(-(-<

In reply to Re: sorting a file by a date:"YYYY-MM-DD" field with cmp by AnomalousMonk
in thread sorting a file by a date:"YYYY-MM-DD" field with cmp by jason.printer

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