Nice catch AnomalousMonk, but it still breaks for me on 5.18 per OP's statement above:

c:\repos\berrybrew>perl -le "@_ = qw( a b c ); @A = ( shift @_ )[ 0, 0
+ ]; print @A"
a

c:\repos\berrybrew>perl -v

This is perl 5, version 18, subversion 4 (v5.18.4) built for MSWin32-x
+64-multi-thread
[download]

I'm having some issues (per CB mention) with fetching versions on my Unix machines with perlbrew available, so all I can test on is Windows currently.