But "I know you asked me for the count of tokens, but by the way, I've also stuck those tokens into @_ (silently overwriting your sub args!) just in case that's useful."? Nope! I can not see any rational for that.

You're assuming split was written to easily count the number of tokens. It wasn't. It was written to split a string. Which it does. Even in void and scalar context. The fact it returns the number of tokens in scalar context is the additional feature, not its reason for existence.

I guess the reasoning was "Hmmm, we have a function that splits a string into other strings. What can we do if there are users who call this in non-list context?" Not throwing away the result and putting in in the default list topicalizer doesn't seem that far fetched to me.

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