Another way is to take advantage of pop's default behaviour of acting on @_ by calling an anonymous subroutine on the fly.

johngg@shiraz:~/perl/Monks$ perl -Mstrict -Mwarnings -E '
say sub { pop }->( 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 );'
9
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I hope this is of interest.

Update: Note that shift can work the same way and that both by default operate on @ARGV in the main program.

johngg@shiraz:~/perl/Monks$ perl -Mstrict -Mwarnings -E '
say sub { shift }->( 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 );'
1
johngg@shiraz:~/perl/Monks$ perl -Mstrict -Mwarnings -E 'say pop' a b 
+c
c
johngg@shiraz:~/perl/Monks$ perl -Mstrict -Mwarnings -E 'say shift' a 
+b c
a
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