I don't know what your array elements are, but for example one million strings of a few characters length each can eat up quite some memory; I'd rather go with the references.

There's some convenience you can provide: You can return an array reference in scalar context, and the array itself in list context: 

return wantarray ? @array : \@array;

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The the caller can decide which version she wants.

In reply to Re: Return a Reference or Array? by moritz
in thread Return a Reference or Array? by Anonymous Monk

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