Yeah, I know the differences between a list and an array. And I know that split returns a list, but it is slightly more tricky than that. If you do this:

my $c = qw / 4 6 8 90/;
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$c's value becomes the last element of the list (90). But if you do this:

 $c = split / /, "the quick brown fox";
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$c is now 4, the number of elements of the array (I think this would also trigger a warning that @_ may be overwritten). But if you do this:

 $c = (split / /, "the quick brown fox")[2];
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now this behaves as an anonymous array et $c is assigned to "brown" (and there no longer any warning, because Perl sort of built an anonymous array). And if you do this:

 $c = [split / /, "the quick brown fox"];
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$c's value is now something like "ARRAY(0x80359d10)", i.e. an array reference. and you need something like this:

print $c->[2];
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to print the third element of the array. This is really an array ref, not an array.