Maybe your friend is thinking of negative indexes. 

$a[-1]  # last element
$a[-2]  # second-last element

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This is much older than 5.10. It also works on slices 

@a[-2, -1]  # second-last and last element

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But you have to keep in mind that ".." has nothing to do with slices. If the LHS is greater than the RHS, it returns an empty list. 

>perl -E"@a = qw( a b c d e f ); say for @a[4..-1]"

>perl -E"@a = qw( a b c d e f ); say for @a[-3..-1]"
d
e
f

>perl -E"@a = qw( a b c d e f ); say for @a[-1..-3]"

>perl -E"@a = qw( a b c d e f ); say for @a[reverse -3..-1]"
f
e
d

>perl -E"@a = qw( a b c d e f ); say for reverse @a[-3..-1]"
f
e
d

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In reply to Re: Getting range from N..end with list slice by ikegami
in thread Getting range from N..end with list slice by Marshall

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