Without wantarray perl doesn't seem to reduce memory usage

sub mm { print( (`pslist -m $$ 2>NUL`)[-2,-1] )}
sub ff { my @fudge = 1 .. 1_000_000; @fudge }
sub fa { scalar @{[ &ff ]} }
mm; ff; mm; warn fa;
__END__
Name                Pid      VM      WS    Priv Priv Pk   Faults   Non
+P Page
perl                796   62168   46336   44336   48196    12572      
+2   34
Name                Pid      VM      WS    Priv Priv Pk   Faults   Non
+P Page
perl                796   66076   50280   48252   48260    13582      
+2   34
1000000 at - line 4.
[download]

Using the accumulator doesn't appear to reduce memory usage, because one function still returns a list

sub mm { print( (`pslist -m $$ 2>NUL`)[-2,-1] )}
sub ff { my @fudge = 1 .. 1_000_000; @fudge }
sub fa { scalar( () = &ff ) }
mm; ff; mm; warn fa;
__END__
Name                Pid      VM      WS    Priv Priv Pk   Faults   Non
+P Page
perl               1432   62168   46336   44336   48196    12572      
+2   34
Name                Pid      VM      WS    Priv Priv Pk   Faults   Non
+P Page
perl               1432   66076   50280   48252   48260    13582      
+2   34
1000000 at - line 4.
[download]

I suppose this could actually be optimized, I see no technical reason, but its fairly minor