The canonical way of getting the number of elements of the list a function returns in list context is not by using 'map' (although that will work), but by assigning the result to an empty list, and assigning that to a scalar: 
    my $count = () = expression_in_list_context;

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And if you remove some spaces, you're left with one of Perls secret operators: 
    my $count =()= expression;   # Goatse operator.

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In reply to Re: Scalar context of slice by JavaFan
in thread Scalar context of slice by thenaz

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