(that is, dereference an anonymous list of the item being forced to list context. See perlref for more on how referencing/de-referencing works.)

Anyone know WHY () doesn't work as the list version of scalar? I'm assuming there is either a good programming or perl innards practical reason, because I doubt that arturo and I were the only ones thinking this incorrectly.

There was a long thread about this on perl6-language the other day. There's no need for a "list" operator (opposing the "scalar" operator) because everything that can make use of list context already provides list context automatically.

And there are no consistent ways to "downcast" a list to a scalar, so you'd have to be explicit about what you wanted: first element, last element, count, and so on. And all of those are already available, either in the form of a literal slice:

$first = (list_context_expr)[0];
$last = (list_context_expr)[-1];
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or list-assignment operator:

$count = (() = list_context_expr);
# also written as: $count= () = list_context_expr;
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So, a "list" operator is neither necessary nor sufficient. Parens are not a "list" operator. They're just a syntax helper, usually for precedence.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

@values = (param('foo'));
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The 'extra' parens around the param() call force list context.

@values = param 'foo';
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-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

According to the documentation, maybe, and probably lots of your experience, it will work just fine.
This didn't work for me. All the array values I passed were dumped into the first array element when I tried
@list = param 'foo'; I was forced to add


@list_f = split /\s+/, $list[0];
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I'm sure this had something to do with slices.
I sent the data to this script using
script.pl?list=@list