Because print takes a list as an argument so @fred is not coerced into scalar context. In your original print @fred."\n" the concatenation coerces scalar context, hence the "10" but if you'd used a comma instead of a full stop then that would have been a list and the elements of @fred would have been printed.

$ perl -Mstrict -Mwarnings -e '
> my @fred = qw{ one two three };
> print @fred . qq{\n};
> print @fred, qq{\n};
> print qq{@fred\n};'
3
onetwothree
one two three
[download]

I hope this makes things clearer.

Got it, thank you! :)

Because you are then passing the array  @fred to the function print as an argument list; the array is evaluated in list context and yields its individual elements.

Update: E.g.:

c:\@Work\Perl>perl -wMstrict -e
"sub foo {
   print $_[1];
   print qq{\n};
   ;;
   my @copy_of_arguments = @_;
   print $copy_of_arguments[1];
   print qq{\n};
   }
 ;;
 my @ra = qw(one two three);
 foo(@ra);
 ;;
 foo('four', 'five', 'six');
"
two
two
five
five
[download]