"They are not in scalar context."

You are absolutely correct!
And this is the part where I need to put my hand up and admit that I have "cargo-culted" this technique without really taking the time to work out what was really going on.

I first saw this technique used in some code written by a co-worker some years ago. It was basically used to read a fixed number of lines from a very small configuration file. I adopted it and have used it from time to time to do the same thing. Fortunately, I've never been bitten because I've never used it in a loop to retrieve multiple "sets".

My apologies to the OP, and thanks for pointing this out.

Cheers,
Darren