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7stud has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Dear Monks,

Here is the code I have a question about:

sub do_stuff {
    my($x) = ($_[0] || 0);
    ...
}
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Do the parentheses around $x do anything? It seems to me that the rhs will always be a scalar, and these are equivalent:

my $x = 10;
print $x, "\n";

my ($y) = 10;
print $y, "\n";

--output:--
10
10
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