They make print aware that it's dealing with a list of different items, due to list operator precedence rules.

According to perlop:

In the absence of parentheses, the precedence of list operators such as print, sort, or chmod is either very high or very low depending on whether you are looking at the left side or the right side of the operator. For example, in 
    @ary = (1, 3, sort 4, 2);
    print @ary;         # prints 1324

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the commas on the right of the sort are evaluated before the sort, but the commas on the left are evaluated after. In other words, list operators tend to gobble up all the arguments that follow them, and then act like a simple TERM with regard to the preceding expression. Note that you have to be careful with parentheses: 
    # These evaluate exit before doing the print:
    print($foo, exit);  # Obviously not what you want.
    print $foo, exit;   # Nor is this.

    # These do the print before evaluating exit:
    (print $foo), exit; # This is what you want.
    print($foo), exit;  # Or this.
    print ($foo), exit; # Or even this.

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In reply to Re^3: This is odd. by mr_mischief
in thread This is odd. by JDelmoso

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