Thanks to all. I am happy that there is no wisely hidden reason for having done this. There is other internal evidence that probably the programmer had some other language in mind. Several old perl hands have commented to me that they never ever saw this oddness before. It makes me feel better that _I_ never have, either. I'm going to replace them all with ()'s. Then comes the hard part, getting rid of all the global variables I've inherited.

In reply to Re^2: Unusual (and pointless?) idiom in old code by ajmalton
in thread Unusual (and pointless?) idiom in old code by ajmalton

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