Question: I sometimes see Perl code like this:

```
my ( $variable ) = blah....

```

What is the point of putting parentheses around a single variable? I thought parentheses were only used when declaring multiple variables, like:

```
my ( $var1, $var2, $var3 ) = blah...

```

Answer: 
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](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3728337/).
I'm not a Perl pro (by all means, I'm not), but AFAIK it has to do with lists.
Perl has different contexts (scalar, list). Using `($var)` switches to list context, `$var` is scalar context.

```
my $var = (1, 2, 4);   # $var = 4 (last element)
my ($var) = (1, 2, 4); # $var = 1

```