Are you sure you don't want to use Lisp? :)

Frank Antonsen had an article about this is The Perl Review 1.1 when he talked about "Functional Programming in Perl".

Besides getting the head and tail of a list, you also have to decide if you want the original array to stay intact.

Non-destructive

You can keep the original array as it is with a bit of copying.

my( $head, @tail ) = @array;
[download]

Destructive

my $head = shift @array;
my @tail = @array
[download]