Not quite. Shift removes the first entry from the list, a simple assignment doesn't (although since that list is never used again, in this context it makes no difference - except that the assignment is slightly faster). Compare:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
my @list = qw/a b c/;
my ($x) = @list;
print "X: $x, List: @list\n";
my $y = shift @list;
print "Y: $y, List: @list\n";
[download]

The output being:

X: a, List: a b c
Y: a, List: b c

???, I think one of us misread the question. I talk about the difference from my $x = shift; and my ($x) = shift @_; sure, there is a difference, but not in the context of the question.
Boris

Whoops. I've never seen anybody shift into an list context before. I must have had a bit of a blind spot there.