I agree entirely. From a Huffman-encoding viewpoint, I'd say doing shift @a to discard the first element of the array and doing $_ = shift @a to put that discarded element in $_ is a far better allocation of characters than () = shift @a for discarding and shift @a for storing in $_. Not to mention those empty LHS parens look odd to some folks.
Jeff japhy Pinyan, P.L., P.M., P.O.D, X.S.: Perl, regex, and perl hacker
How can we ever be the sold short or the cheated, we who for every service have long ago been overpaid? ~~ Meister Eckhart

In reply to Re^2: shift doesn't DWIM by japhy
in thread shift doesn't DWIM by GrandFather

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