I did not intend to ask the question How do I use the tertiary operator?. Both these answers rely on the trivial lc operation I used in my example.

To rephrase: What's the most elegant way to modify the default behavior of a subroutine that returns a list of one?

sub lowercase {
  my @out = map { lc } @_ ;
  return wantarray ? map { $_ } @out : first { $_ } @out ;
  }
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So my specific question is: How can I move the operation from the first line into the second line to avoid using the place holder out?