Actually, I seem to recall that there exists an obscure case in which return; and return (); differ materially..

Yes, Perl "bare return" does things that might not be expected. Basically, I figure it is a bad idea to use a "bare" "return;" and I just don't do it. The below code is a simple demo... "return" will return something unless you tell it to return "nothing". As I mentioned before, "returning nothing" is useful in map{}, but for a normal function, I would return "undef". 

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

sub x
{
   my $a =5;
}

print x; #prints 5

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Update: This part was wrong...goof in my testing! got a bit confused while doing this quickly...Oooops...I'll have to look at some other code I did awhile ago to find a better example...I think I have one somewhere. Anyway the idea of returning $x or () from within map{} is right idea to "skip" a value in output list. 
sub x1
{
   my $a =5;
   return;
}
print x1; #still prints 5! Whoa!
#"return'" returns value of last true statement.
#if you don't specify something else for it to return.

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sub x2
{
   my $a =5;
   return ();
}

print "x2:",x2; #prints "x2:" , ie nothing from sub x2

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Update: I don't see any basic disagreement or argument, but perhaps a misunderstanding of the application for this:

But my questions in Re^2: reset particular variable were in the context of a discussion of differences between the $var = (); and $var = undef; et al statements, differences I still don't see.

@outputlist = map{..code...}@inputlist;

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If I can "skip a value", instead of returning "undef" from the map, then say @outputlist could have fewer items in the list than @inputlist. Later when @outputlist is processed, there doesn't have to be code that says "check for undefined value", because there won't be any.

In reply to Re^5: reset particular variable by Marshall
in thread reset particular variable by abubacker

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