IIRC the parens are needed to avoid some ambiguity in parsing.
Possibly. However using this style it is easy to trigger the function call on previous statement vs parenthetical prefix-_expression_ on new ambiguity in Lua 5.1
somefunc() ("foo"):bar()
is that
somefunc()("foo"):bar()
pr
somefunc()
("foo"):bar()
Cab require infinite lookahead. Lus used to require a newline to resolve the ambiguity...significant whitespace!. I don't know if this was addressed in Lua 5.2, or the error was just removed.
