Thanks, tye and tilly, for putting my attempt in the context of the larger discussion. (I did search around for precedent posts to cite but got only looong lists of hits that seemed to be about other issues.)

Tilly, I am particularly struck by the following, cribbed and expanded upon from your post:

sub ret_array { return @_; }
sub ret_list  { return @_[0..$#_]; }

my @array = ('a','b','c');

print scalar ret_array('a','b','c'); # 3
print scalar ret_array(@array);      # 3

print scalar ret_list('a','b','c');  # c
print scalar ret_list(@array);       # c
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