I hate being cruel... but read the parser.

Mhm. That's been on my todo list for a long time now. The parser, the tokenizer and the lexer. Well.. lots of excuses..

In one sense, those parentheses only mark the empty list, but it's probably more accurate to say that those do create a list.

as is the case with

@list = (1) x 15;
[download]

If parentheses did create lists, what would you expect this code to do?

my $x = ( 1 + 2 ) * 3;

I would expect the parens to do grouping. I didn't assume that parens always create lists (which they don't), but that they do - sometimes:

$_ = "foo bar baz";
$middle = (split)[1];
[download]

Well, as everywhere with perl - contetxt matters...

--shmem

update: replaced nonsensical $_ = qw(foo bar baz) with $_ = "foo bar baz". Common typo ;)

_($_=" "x(1<<5)."?\n".q·/)Oo.  G°\        /
                              /\_¯/(q    /
----------------------------  \__(m.====·.(_("always off the crowd"))."·
");sub _{s./.($e="'Itrs `mnsgdq Gdbj O`qkdq")=~y/"-y/#-z/;$e.e && print}