in reply to Can someone clarify what's happening here

If you use warnings, you'll have your answer. See use strict and warnings.
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Re^2: Can someone clarify what's happening here
by duranain (Initiate) on Aug 11, 2010 at 02:03 UTC
    use strict causes it to whinge that i'm not using my to declare @perls, but if that's fixed, the code still exhibits the same behavior (@{shift()} works, @{shift} does not)
[reply]
      Did you forgot to remove the parens? You should have gotten a warning and a strict error, but of which explain the issue. 
      use strict;
use warnings;

my @perls = (1, 2, 3, 4);
sub foo
{
  my @foo = @{shift};
  return join $/, @foo
}
print foo(\@perls)

      [download]
      Ambiguous use of @{shift} resolved to @shift at a.pl line 7.
Global symbol "@shift" requires explicit package name at a.pl line 7.
Execution of a.pl aborted due to compilation errors.

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