Using my with parentheses and only one variable

Question

I sometimes see Perl code like this:

my ( $variable ) = blah....

What is the point of putting parentheses around a single variable? I thou

Answer 1

The parentheses create a list context which affects how the right hand side of the assignment is evaluated.

Compare

my $x = grep { /s/ } qw(apples bananas cherries);
print $x;

with

my ($x) = grep { /s/ } qw(apples bananas cherries);
print $x;

You will often use this construction when you just want to grab the first element of a list and discard the rest.