Interestingly, if I pass pop a slice, it seems to operate on the last element in the slice, popping the last element from the array to which that element is a reference. If I pass it a slice of ordinary scalars (not array references) it errors. All this is since version 5.14, by the way; prior to that pop simply demands an array as the first argument. Also, perldoc -f pop says this is experimental behavior, so it'd probably be best to keep dereferencing for now and not count on this. 

#!/usr/bin/env perl
use Modern::Perl;
use Data::Dumper;

my @cards = ([qw[0 1 2 3]],
             [qw[4 5 6 7]],
             [qw[8 9 A B]],
             [qw[C D E F]],
             );
say pop @cards;       # pop the last array element [C D E F]
say pop @cards[0,1];  # pop from a two-element slice, gets 7 from @$ca
+rds[1];
say pop @cards[0];    # pop from a one-element slice, gets 3 from @$ca
+rds[0], throws warning
say pop $cards[0];    # pop from a scalar array reference, gets 2 from
+ @$cards[0]
say Dumper @cards;    # see what's left in the array

my @list = (0..15);
say pop @list[3..5];  # error, not an ARRAY reference

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Aaron B.
My Woefully Neglected Blog, where I occasionally mention Perl.

In reply to Re^2: What I am missing here by aaron_baugher
in thread What I am missing here by heatblazer

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