I am pleased with the first five responses in this thread. I was trying to start an broad discussion.

I'll re-emphasize my first point: I was not expecting this small practice to improve my Perling so much, so quickly. I wanted to advertise this to others. I thank Merlyn again for his post.

In the second part of my post I was trying to expose my cognitive state in dealing with the syntax of Perl. I hoped to elicit from my Perl betters some explanation of their mental process in parsing or reading code.

I feel that I mentally gloss over opening parentheses, braces and such, and that the bad habit comes from reading simple code. I wondered if the more fluent readers of Perl just do what I do, but better, or if there is some redirect or quirk at a parenthesis whose partner is not in sight.

Be well.