in reply to Re^6: get a certain number of words from a line
in thread get a certain number of words from a line

Must have been a bug in 5.8.0 that was causing the behavior. Upgrading to 5.8.4 makes it behave like everyone expects. Just for the record, here's what you get for the above query on 5.8.0... 
perl -e '$x = \((0..3)); print @$x'
0123

[download]

-- All code is 100% tested and functional unless otherwise noted.

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom