(Please see Update below. I'm not editing out my mistakes, but I don't want to confuse readers.)

I'm going to have to disagree with this statement. As far as I can see from the provided code, they are very close to the same.

Furthermore, I believe that the extra set of parens in your example makes no difference in the functionality. Try this for yourself:

perl -e 'foreach my $i ((1,2,3,4)) { print "$i\n" }'
[download]

Update: I'm now going to correct myself. I misread the original code thinking that the loop variable was being used to select the strings that were being replaced. However, the loopvariable is being used to select the strings that are being modified.

Yes! These are different. and I'll expand further, but wanted to get this correction out quickly.

-- Eric Hammond