But that won't return anything in list context! The other problem is that you need to call value() with the same context each recursive time. I think breaking it down via wantarray() is the simplest solution.
Jeff japhy Pinyan,
P.L., P.M., P.O.D, X.S.:
Perl,
regex,
and perlhacker How can we ever be the sold short or the cheated, we who for every service have long ago been overpaid? ~~ Meister Eckhart