First, your qw{} is wrong. Don't use commas there. Warnings would have told you otherwise.

Second, the subroutine's last expression (the return value) is evaluated in the context of the caller. The expression:

my $ret_val = (@array, 1);
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doesn't assign 4 to $ret_val. It uses the comma operator to calcuate the elements of the list one by one, and then discards all but the last, thus returning 1 there.

I have a column on context that you might find useful.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
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