I agree with davido, I don't think it makes sense to necessarily return the same thing every time in scalar context. It wouldn't make sense to have the "wantarray" function at all if scalar context always returned the length of the list. A sub-routine could just always return a list and if it was in scalar context the list length would be given. But the usefullness of "wantarray" is that you can return something different if you know you are in scalar context and not list context.