As side note nor your expectation nor your output can be as you posted: you shift before printing, so first number will always be 2.

The interesting thing is that this to avoid syntax always stops after the first middle of the array:

perl -E "@ar=(1..$ARGV[0]);foreach(@ar){shift @ar;}print qq(@ar\n)" 4
3 4

perl -E "@ar=(1..$ARGV[0]);foreach(@ar){shift @ar;}print qq(@ar\n)" 10
6 7 8 9 10

perl -E "@ar=(1..$ARGV[0]);foreach(@ar){shift @ar;}print qq(@ar\n)" 20
11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20
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L*