As you get used to Perl programming, I think you will find that (lists) are your friends. Experience will undoubtedly teach you when parentheses can be used only for precedence.

Also, I think that you will find that the specific uses for [brackets] to construct lists are also worth the small inconvenience of not being able to use parentheses without considering whether or not you are emitting a list. You see, square brackets can be used to generate an anonymous list reference, so you can generate a list of lists, or a list within a hash. Very powerful data structures can easily be built in Perl with these constructs. Detailed information about these constructions can be found in the perlref documentation.

Attacking lists may be seen by some as tilting at a sacred part of Perl, so some people might be tempted to downvote your meditation. I would suggest otherwise; your question is valid coming from a new Perl programmer, and should be answered. But I do encourage you to explore the power of lists in Perl, and the ease of creating complex data structures with Perl's current syntax. I think you will end up loving (lists) and their syntax as much as most of the rest of us.

Cheers

In reply to Re: List context, expression precedence, and () by HyperZonk
in thread List context, expression precedence, and () by pmas

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