Is there a one-liner to get the first element of a split?

Instead of writing:

@holder = split /\./,"hello.world"; 
print @holder[0];

is it possible to just do a one-liner to just get the first element of the split? Something like:

print (split /\./,"hello.world")[0]

I get the following error when I try the second example:

print (...) interpreted as function at test.pl line 3.
syntax error at test.pl line 3, near ")["