a list in scalar context returns its last element

There's a somewhat detailed discussion of what's wrong with this idea starting about here. Here's one problem with it:

my @x = ( 6, 7, 8 );
my $last_element = (4, 5, @x)[-1];
my $as_scalar = (4, 5, @x);

print "last element: $last_element\n";
print "as scalar: $as_scalar\n";
__END__
last element: 8
as scalar: 3
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One might say that the scalar context is applied to the last element of the list expression (not the list itself). Note that scalar sub_that_returns_list() will apply the scalar context to everything in the sub's return list, but scalar ( 'literal', 'list', 'expression' ) puts 'literal' and 'list' in void context.