actually, methods (and subs in general) can return arrays

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

That's all well and good to say -- but it might help to give a little context (Oh my, what pun!) to ponder:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

my $scalar;
my @list;

sub foo {
    return (42, 24, 10);
}

sub bar {
    my @array = (42, 24, 10);
    return @array;
}

$scalar = foo();          # same as: $scalar = (42,24,10);
@list   = foo();          # same as: @list   = (42,24,10);
print "$scalar:@list\n";  # prints: 10:42 24 10

$scalar = bar();          # same as: $scalar = @array;
@list   = bar();          # same as: @list   = @array;
print "$scalar:@list\n";  # prints: 3:42 24 10
__END__
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[methods (and subs in general)] can return lists in a list context, or scalars in a scalar context. Nothing else. Cannot return an array.

Okay, merlyn. I'm puzzled again. If anyone else had posted this assertion, I would have made this as a correction rather than a genuine inquiry. The following snippet seems to demonstrate the ret_array sub returning an array. But I've been enough rounds on the array/list thing to know that things ain't always what they seem. Is more happening here than meets the eye?

sub ret_array { return @_; }
sub ret_list  { return @_[0..$#_]; }

my @array = ('a','b','c');

print scalar ret_array('a','b','c'); # 3
print scalar ret_array(@array);      # 3

print scalar ret_list('a','b','c');  # c
print scalar ret_list(@array);       # c
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