Wow, that clears it up.
I had done '$a=*' in the debugger, which causes 'print $a' to show it as a glob (*main::;). I suppose the trick is that the debugger took it upon itself to add a couple of semi-colons in there, making it '$a=*;;' or in other words '$a=*{";"};'.

In reply to Re: Answer: What does ($*) do, and how is it different than (${*{''}})? by entropy
in thread How do I get the * glob, what is $*, and what is *{''}? by entropy

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