I have two reasonably short potential equivalents to your list() function. Which of these do you want? Remember that it will should work the same for all arguments, so the fact that we're using localtime here is irrelevant.

my ($n) =  localtime;
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or

my $n = (localtime)[-1];
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Context is given by the left hand side of an assignment, but its interpretation is done by the right hand side.

update: also note that the current interpretation of scalar context by a list means that the last element is returned, wich would mean that your list() function would act like:

(1,2,3,4) != list(1,2,3,4);
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