Anonymous Monk,
You could turn the array slice into an anonymous array:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

my @list = (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7);

my $ref = [@list[2..4]];
print @$ref;
[download]

The thing is that it will not reflect changes in the original array. If you want to do that, you need to make a ref to the original array and then use a slice when you dereference it.

When you are not getting what you expect by de-referencing something, you can always do print ref $ref, $/;

Cheers - L~R