I'm not going to defend Perl 5's dereferencing syntax for container operations. Perl 6 changed that for a very good reason. I could give you examples of Ruby'

I'm not going to defend Perl 5's dereferencing syntax for container operations. Perl 6 changed that for a very good reason. I could give you examples of Ruby's and Python's inconsistency in their use of parentheses, as sometimes they group expressions to influence parsing precedence and sometimes they denote first-class data structures, but as you persist in asserting that parentheses create lists in Perl and that lists are first-class data structures, I suspect this discussion will continue to go nowhere.