I've a ghastly feeling that this is something blatantly obvious. Unfortunately I've got nobody here to tell me what exactly and the rubber duck has been surprisingly unhelpful.

Can anybody tell me why with this code:

#! /usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

{   package SomePackage;
    use Exporter 'import';
    our @EXPORT = ( 'hello' );
        
    sub hello (&) { print "hello\n" }
    
    # works with the prototype inside the package
    hello { die "should not be called" }
}

SomePackage->import( 'hello' );

# works outside the package with a fully qualified name
SomePackage::hello { die "should not be called" };

# works outside the package if we ignore prototypes
hello( sub { die "should not be called" } );

# perl does know what the prototype is
print "prototype is ", prototype \&hello, "\n";

# and yet...
hello { die "should not be called" };
[download]

that last call to hello() is parsed as:

do {
    die 'should not be called'
}->hello;
[download]

rather than as a call to SomePackage::hello

I'm off to the library and to get some coffee. Hopefully somebody will demonstrate where I'm being dim by the time I get back :-)