Change this line:

my $ref = \{@list[2..4]};
[download]

to

my $ref = [@list[2..4]]
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and you should have what you want.

(update: well not a reference but a copy, as my fellow monks have kindly pointed out, and sauoq (among others) explains nicely below).

What $ref is holding is a reference to a reference of an anonymous hash. (what happens with the curly braces, rather than with the square ones.) As Data::Dumper clearly shows:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use Data::Dumper;
use strict;
use warnings;

my @list = (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7);
print "@list\n";
my @short = @list[1..4];
print "@short\n";
my $ref = \{@list[2..4]};
print Dumper $ref;

__DATA__
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
1 2 3 4
Odd number of elements in anonymous hash at C:\test_bed\testme.pl line
+ 10.
$VAR1 = \{
            '4' => undef,
            '2' => 3
          };
[download]

-enlil