perl - How to the access the last item of a list returned by a subroutine without copying it into an array first? -

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• how can selectively access elements returned perl subroutine? 3 answers

i'm looking computationally less expensive way access last item of list returned subroutine (without modifying subroutine itself).

as see i'm doing below copying returned list named array @list, or anonymous array [], , accessing last value of array, not directly last item of returned list.

is there shortcut here? how can directly access last item of returned list?

sub range { return 0 .. 10**7 } 

this takes 0.808 seconds of user time according gnu time:

my @array = range(); print pop @array; 

and here 0.792 seconds:

my @array = range(); print $array[$#array], "\n" 

0.680 seconds:

print pop [ range() ] 

subroutines don't return arrays, return lists. you're correct that

my @array = list(); 

copies values returned list() array. if care last value, can use list slice:

use strict; use warnings 'all'; use 5.010;  sub range {     return 0 .. 10**7; }  ($last) = ( range() )[-1]; $last; # 10000000