Or, the language designer thinking he's saving programmers work by jus returning the value in cases where there is a list of length one.
However, he's really making it worse because now all return values from that function have to be type-checked to see whether they are scalars or lists.
R comes to mind, where once in a blue moon a matrix result will happen to only have a single column, which R helpfully decides should be turned into a simple vector, which then doesn't have the matrix operations available anymore (like dim()), and kaboom!
Yeah. I learned LISP pretty early in my career, wrote a few LISP interpreters, and those are indeed the kinds of bugs that I was stomping. PowerShell seems to have turned those bugs into language features. Augh.
However, he's really making it worse because now all return values from that function have to be type-checked to see whether they are scalars or lists.