Hallo, ye monks so perlish.

This is just one of those things that I've never understood and never gotten around to asking. In most cases, the parenthesis following a function are optional, but in some cases, they seem to be downright forbidden. My most recent encounter was:

local($/ = chr 4);

[download]

Seems to set $/ globally. This flummoxed me to no end, until I tried:

local $/ = chr 4;

[download]

Which worked as expected.

There is another area where I've noticed that parenthesis seem to be forbidden, and I'd love to know why:

my @list = qw( why does this not work);
map( { print $_."\n" }, @list );

[download]

These are points of confusion that I've lived with and never understood. Any light shed would be most appriciated.

Your humble obedient servant
--Pileofrogs

In reply to Why is local($/) different from local $/? by pileofrogs

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