The difference is that one can possibly land you in jail, while the other won't. Or something to that effect.

I'm a particular fan of brackets, even when not strictly necessary, but I have been warned that this does have some side-effects on commands that are sensitive to the calling context. Maybe your biggest fear is only the Perl Police.

Certain commmands do different things in different contexts. Consider an example from the above article:
my ($fortune) = `fortune`;
When the backtick detects "array context", it splits up the lines returned by the command into an array and returns it. $fortune then gets the first element/line and the rest go unassigned.
my $fortune = `fortune`;
In scalar context, the entire result is returned in one string, meaning that the linefeeds are not split.

Or compare the two here, using the context sensitive localtime function: 
my ($time1) = localtime;
my  $time2  = localtime;

print "$time1 / $time2\n";

[download]
This prints, for me at least: "42 / Sat Jul 21 03:02:42 2001", which shows you how important those brackets can be.

In reply to Re: difference between ($scalar) and $scalar by tadman
in thread difference between ($scalar) and $scalar by c

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.