The "context" means the context that the function is called in -- whether the values of the function will be used in list or scalar context.

use strict;
use warnings;

sub what_do_you_want {
    print wantarray ? "list\n" : "scalar\n";
}

my @list = what_do_you_want();   # prints "list"
my $scalar = what_do_you_want()  # prints "scalar"
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