Read the code again. That's exactly what it does.

Err, no. When I replied to your post, it only dealt with numbers as elements. You've since changed your post by adding the second program. Here is a demonstration that the first version of your post does not work for text:

#!/usr/bin/perl

#my $text = '1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8';
my $text = 'a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i,j';

my (@even, @odd);
push @{ $_ % 2 ? \@odd : \@even }, $_ for split /,/, $text;

print "odd = @odd, even = @even\n";

__END__

output (first $text):
odd = 1 3 5 7, even = 2 4 6 8

output (second $text):
odd = , even = a b c d e f g h i j
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Actually, that is the one I added later. The one with the counter was there from the beginning — in fact, the first solution I wrote was the one with the slice (I added the foreach-push one before posting because the slice is too obscure).

Makeshifts last the longest.