@foods = qw(burgers fries shakes); $length = @foods; Not to mention that this refactoring introduces a bug: $length = qw(burgers fries shakes); Because l

@foods = qw(burgers fries shakes); $length = @foods; Not to mention that this refactoring introduces a bug: $length = qw(burgers fries shakes); Because lists and arrays convert to scalars differently. A list is more of a syntactic construct and an array is a data structure. Confused the heck out of me my first few weeks of Perl.