Two quick notes:

Your inner while is redundant with your outer while. You can get rid of
push @ret, [ shift ] while @_ and (! $_[1] or ! ref $_[1]);

It wouldn't have hurt to note that your function destroys the original data structure.

Update: Me bad.

In reply to Re^2: A maybe(?) interesting comp-sci type problem by ikegami
in thread A maybe(?) interesting comp-sci type problem by Anonymous Monk

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