And if you really want to use a slice:

>perl -wMstrict -le
"my $date = '2010/03/17';
 print qq{'$date'};
 my @date_array = split '/', $date;
 my $new_date = join '-', @date_array[2, 1, 0];
 print qq{'$new_date'};
"
'2010/03/17'
'17-03-2010'
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