Heh :) Even though your answering a totally different question, it does raise another issue. Why are the following three cases treated differently?

    $lines[0]       = [ 3,2,1 ];
    print    $lines[0][ 3,2,1 ];
    print @{$lines[0]}[ 3,2,1 ];
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Ignoring, for the moment, the "Useless use of constant in void context" warnings, how does Perl know that the first use of [ 3,2,1 ] is to generate a reference to an anonymous array from a list, while the second example doesn't reduce to this:

    print $lines[ARRAY(0x1a7efd8)];
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We have the same issue with the third example recognizing that [ 3,2,1 ] is to be used as a list of array indices for the slice.

This behavior should is difficult to keep straight:

    $lines[0] = [ "dog", "cat" ];
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Why doesn't that just assign "cat" to the first element of @lines? My assumption is that it is because the square brackets are performing a subtle double-duty. In this example:

    print $lines[0][0,1];
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the square brackets are being used to indicate an array element. In another example:

    $lines[0] = [ "dog", "cat" ];
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the square brackets are being used to create a reference to an anonymous array and constructs the anonymous array from a list. Keeping things straight can be a major headache, which is why I'm glad Perl does it for me :)

Cheers,
Ovid

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