I have a 2D array, and I want to return just a "column" of the array. For example,

@ary = ( [1, 2, 3],
         [4, 5, 6],
         [7, 8, 9] );
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So, I want some function that would return (1, 4, 7). The best I've been able to do is this:

map { $_->[0] } @ary[0..$#ary]
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This doesn't seem very "nice," and I don't like the map solution because it isn't terribly suggestive of what the code actually does. Anyone have a better way to do this? Maybe something with hash slices? @ary[0..$#ary][0] doesn't work.