Call me naive, but I only see a scalar, not a list of scalars.

A list of one scalar is still a list of scalars. You know that parens aren't the what make lists.

Still a list of of scalars is a list, not an array

Ok, so you say the coercion that occurs is from list to array. If that's true, then 

my @a = @b;

[download]

also does coercion (array to list, then list to array), and the topic becomes irrelevant and silly. It may be true, but the concept is completely useless and not worth discussing.

So you haven't convinced me in either case that not coercion is happening.

I concede it's at best a grey area, and not one I care much about.

Update: Added last bit.

In reply to Re^6: compiling perl scripts aka why is perl not as fast as C by ikegami
in thread compiling perl scripts aka why is perl not as fast as C by punkish

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