I don't think you can avoid that, but I'm not completely certain.

You might have to remove the pushmark along with the return. When you do that, you get exactly the same opcode tree as if you hadn't used the return keyword, so it's obviously safe.

Ah-ha! I found a situation where return can't simply be omitted.

>perl -MO=Concise,f -e"sub f { return ($x,$y) }"
main::f:
6  <1> leavesub[1 ref] K/REFC,1 ->(end)
-     <@> lineseq KP ->6
1        <;> nextstate(main 1 -e:1) v ->2
5        <@> return KP ->6
2           <0> pushmark s ->3
-           <1> ex-rv2sv sK/1 ->4
3              <#> gvsv[*x] s ->4
-           <1> ex-rv2sv sK/1 ->5
4              <#> gvsv[*y] s ->5
-e syntax OK

>perl -MO=Concise,f -e"sub f { ($x,$y) }"
main::f:
6  <1> leavesub[1 ref] K/REFC,1 ->(end)
-     <@> lineseq KP ->6
1        <;> nextstate(main 1 -e:1) v ->2
5        <@> list KP ->6
2           <0> pushmark s ->3
-           <1> ex-rv2sv sK/1 ->4
3              <#> gvsv[*x] s ->4
-           <1> ex-rv2sv sK/1 ->5
4              <#> gvsv[*y] s ->5
-e syntax OK
[download]

That gives me something to look at.

But how are they different? Those both do exactly the same thing in both a scalar and list context, as far as I could tell.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker