With predeclaration or importing, Perl knows that your bareword is a function call. Without a prototype or parentheses around the argument list, Perl doesn't know its arity. There's no simple way to disambiguate between a <> glob call and your expression.

I recommend using a prototype or parentheses.

In reply to Re: Parse error with subroutines and < by chromatic
in thread Parse error with subroutines and < by TedYoung

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