note
muba
<p>That's not a list, that's the [doc://perlop#Comma-Operator|comma operator] in scalar context, which will disregard its left hand value and return its right hand value.</p>
<p>So in <c>my $x = ('a', 'b', 'c');</c>, 'a' and 'b' get discarded, and 'c' gets assigned to $x, as your snippet proves. This behaviour is documented (see the link I gave) and also demonstrated by [doc://B::Deparse]:</p>
<c>
$ perl -MO=Deparse -E '$x = ("a", "b", "c");'
use feature 'current_sub', 'evalbytes', 'fc', 'say', 'state', 'switch', 'unicode_strings', 'unicode_eval';
$x = ('???', '???', 'c');
-e syntax OK
</c>
<p>However, <c>=()=</c> is an idiomatic way to enforce list context. The details are better explained in [id://527973] than I could do it myself, but just to demonstrate that it works, consider the following.</p>
<c>
$ perl -MO=Deparse -E '$x =()= ("a", "b", "c"); print $x'
use feature 'current_sub', 'evalbytes', 'fc', 'say', 'state', 'switch', 'unicode_strings', 'unicode_eval';
$x = () = ('a', 'b', 'c');
print $x;
-e syntax OK
$ perl -E '$x =()= ("a", "b", "c"); print $x'
3
</c>
1016826
1016883