You are aware that
scalar (@x = foo(1,2,3,5));
will evaluate to the number of elements returned by
foo rather than return the last one of them, right?
:) And no, I even considered returning an array ref. (But not a concatenation, yuck - if the caller wants unstructured data he can flatten the array himself, but he can't well unflatten a string.) I'm not going to ask this particular function for two return values when I'm only interested in one of them though. I just don't want to have to remember and to type the parens in every instance I only ask for one return value, because that will be pretty a common case.
CGI::param works the same way with good reason, f.ex.
Makeshifts last the longest.