Well now you make me think about it, I suppose that I do habitually assign my functions to individual scalars. Perhaps this is the XY problem referred to earlier

It sounds like the XY problem is that you've come to Perl from another language and haven't yet fully made the transition.

I have the reverse problem. Every time I use C; I find my self wishing I could return multiple -- and variable numbers of -- values from functions:)

And the funny thing is that if you always assigned your results to an array, it would be much easier to check the number of returned values:

my @results = someFunc();
die unless @results == 3;
...
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