I know why it works, but I have always wondered why people do that trick. Personally I find it works just fine to use string concatenation, and that is a lot less syntax as well. Besides which, the trick puts the function call in array context which is usually what I didn't mean.

Now you know better. But most people shown the above are going to get an interesting surprise when comparing:

print "The current date is @{[localtime()]}.\n";
print "The current date is ".localtime().".\n";
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So, even though using that shows you are an uber-cool Perl hacker, I don't...