It's not verboten, but it can get ugly. :-)

What you're looking for is @$_[0..3] which does a slice of $_ after you dereference it.

On a different note, have you given any thought to explicitly naming the columns you want to return rather than using SELECT *?

If your schema ever changes, @$_[0..3] might not contain what you think it should, but if you did something like this ...

my $rows = $dbh->selectall_arrayref("
  SELECT   foo, bar, baz, quux
  FROM     search_atoms 
  WHERE    occurences >= 5 
  ORDER BY occurences DESC
");

foreach ( @$rows ) {
    print Tr( td( {'-align' => 'left'}, $_ ) );
}
[download]

... each row would only contain what you need and expect, along with the pleasant side effect of not needing to slice up a reference.

    --k.