Intro

# Do this using GREP

my @people = ('Jacob Smith', 'Michael Brown', 'Joshua Smith', 'Matthew
Cope');
@smiths = grep(/smith/i, @people);
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No!

my $first = (grep /smith/i, @people)[0];

But inefficient, because it will grep more than necessary.
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The Snippet

Here's the relevant part of Anno's post, with some formatting added:

I prefer to write that

my ( $first) = grep ...;
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It can easily be combined with a check for uniqueness, which is sometimes an issue:

my @l = qw( foo bar baz);
( my ( $first) = grep /ba/ => @l ) > 1 and warn "not unique\n";
print "first: $first\n";
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Now, I'm also repeating here what I've already written in the original thread: although the behaviour of list assignment in scalar context is well known to me, as is every single bit of syntax and semantics used here, I wouldn't have thought of that, and to do the same thing I would have probably concocted something more clumsy and not just as terse and readable. I suppose that many here are already familiar with the "technique", but I hope it will be of benefit to those that aren't.

BTW: we had recently had again in clpmisc a long, exhausting, often pitaful but in some corners interesting (sub-)thread (link @ GG) vastly dealing exactly with contexts, and lists, and list assignment.