I think the OP is essentially asking (Sixtease please correct me if I'm wrong) how you would make something like the following snippet print "e", and not "2" 

my @x = qw(a b c);
my @y = qw(d e);
print scalar (@x, @y);       # prints "2" (number of elems in @y)

[download]

treating the combined arrays as if they had been written like 

print scalar qw(a b c d e);  # prints "e" (last elem in list)

[download]

Kind of like this 

print scalar ((@x, @y)[0..@x+@y-1]);      # prints "e"
print scalar sub {@_[0..$#_]}->(@x, @y);  # prints "e"

[download]

but less ugly, and without having to take special care of the subtle problem you run into with older versions of Perl when the arrays are empty, and the selecting range for the slice becomes [0..-1]  (what this thread is about, essentially).

Irrespective of whether you'd actually need to do something like this in real-life programming, it's still a valid question in and of itself, IMO.

In reply to Re^3: regexp list return 5.6 vs 5.8 by almut
in thread regexp list return 5.6 vs 5.8 by Sixtease

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.