Thanks for your work maintaining CGI.pm! Thumbs up!

CGI.pm helped building the internet and this design to return a list in list context was perfectly OK back then. One can't predict all edge cases and get a project running.

And after features are released you're bound to backwards compatibility.

It's unfortunate that => wasn't designed as a scalar operator in Perl.

And it's also not CGI's fault that methods like DBI->quote can't propagate signatures.

As I said not all edge cases are predictable.