Seven years later I come to this thread and wonder why what you said here got no real attention.

And seven years later, I still agree with (nearly) everything I myself said in this thread.

Pedantry be damned. It's nice enough ammo for meaningless flame wars on sites like this one but when people are actually working together on a common goal and not pulling out their micrometers for a geek pecker measuring contest, I've learned that many of them are too smart to bother being pedantic.

Thank heavens for that.

Anyway, I'm still saying "returns an array" and everything is moving along as smooth as I might hope. Turns out that telling people what I am doing works just fine. (They've already learned what Perl does.)

And here was the crux of it all along. When I return an array (sub foo { @a = qw/2 4 6 8/ }) it simply doesn't behave the same as when I return a list (sub bar { qw/2 4 6 8/ }). Go figure. And with my convenient shorthand, I don't have to explain about this context or that one and get into petty details unless I'm doing something strange. Like using wantarray.

Makes you wonder if Perl was slapped together by a some crazy linguist or something.