Trying to split hairs is often unconvincing and then annoying to those who disagree.

I don't call @... return a scalar or an array an exceedingly small difference from @... returning a list. I'm not even sure how the difference could be greater.

I'm really not sure what you are talking about. But I even find this reply to be splitting hairs to declare "returning an array" substantially different from "returning a list". I have little clue what you even see as the distinction between those two.

But I'll give you a hint: You may have interpreted the word "context" in a rather strict fashion, significantly changing the context in which these things had been being discussed (you also seem to be leaning heavily on some rather strict definition of "list" that you have failed to qualify, that I have seen). This appears to me to have dragged the conversational context from the realm of semantic hair splitting into technical detail hair splitting. And some might view that as trivializing things (even further than the trivial point they were at).

I was already rather at a loss for how the semantic wrangling could be applied with much significance to the arguments for or against post-fix dereferencing syntax. I found myself quite at a loss for how to apply your response to those semantic wranglings and thus even more at a loss for how to find relevance in them it to what appears to me to be the thread topic.

The closest I have come to understanding your response is to see it as (only implicitly, which makes it worse) splitting hairs on the definition of "the context in which that evaluation is effective" and also fairly tangential to the preceding discussion.

I provide this much detail in my explanation in the hope that some of it will end up being enlightening to you, and not in an attempt to criticize.

- tye