That's not a list, that's the comma operator in scalar context, which will disregard its left hand value and return its right hand value.
So in my $x = ('a', 'b', '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 B::Deparse:
$ 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
However, =()= is an idiomatic way to enforce list context. The details are better explained in Perl Idioms Explained - my $count = () = /.../g than I could do it myself, but just to demonstrate that it works, consider the following.
$ 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
-
Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
-
Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:
<code> <a> <b> <big>
<blockquote> <br /> <dd>
<dl> <dt> <em> <font>
<h1> <h2> <h3> <h4>
<h5> <h6> <hr /> <i>
<li> <nbsp> <ol> <p>
<small> <strike> <strong>
<sub> <sup> <table>
<td> <th> <tr> <tt>
<u> <ul>
-
Snippets of code should be wrapped in
<code> tags not
<pre> tags. In fact, <pre>
tags should generally be avoided. If they must
be used, extreme care should be
taken to ensure that their contents do not
have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent
horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor
intervention).
-
Want more info? How to link
or How to display code and escape characters
are good places to start.