My recollection was that assignment determined it's context by the left-hand side of the operation.

That's impossible for two reasons.

Your code shows that the type of assignment is determined by its LHS, but noone's disputing that.

This seems to imply that the subroutine is evaluated in scalar context in the first assignment.

It is.
Scalar assignment evaluates both its LHS and RHS in scalar context.
List assignment evaluates both its LHS and RHS in list context.

In reply to Re^11: chopping a string into slices - is there a more elegant way to do it? by ikegami
in thread chopping a string into slices - is there a more elegant way to do it? by rovf

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