Must have been a bug in 5.8.0 that was causing the behavior. Upgrading to 5.8.4 makes it behave like everyone expects. Just for the record, here's what you get for the above query on 5.8.0... 
perl -e '$x = \((0..3)); print @$x'
0123

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In reply to Re^7: get a certain number of words from a line by sleepingsquirrel
in thread get a certain number of words from a line by js1

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