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";
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The output being:

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