I understand the principle of why it doesn't work. However I maintain that it would not be unlogical to have as a 'last element' identifier a negative number going from the end of the array.

But since perl doesn't actually use the list as array indexing, but to actually build a list, which is then subsequently used to get a slice from the array, this probably won't be possible/easy.

Thanks for all the replies :) It has greatly improved my understanding of slice definitions.