vrk has already answered your question, I just wanted to give a tip: don't use arrays of numbers to test things like this, otherwise it's hard to tell when the array in scalar context is returning the size of the array.

my @new_array = 'a'..'e';
print @new_array . "\n";       # "5"
print pop(@new_array) . "\n";  # "e"
print @new_array . "\n";       # "4"
print @new_array , "\n";       # "abcd"
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