I assume the curlies are not empty in the original, right?

Wrong :)

If the curlies were empty and the array was not tie()d, then the line would be equivalent to @LogFileList = ();

Except worse :)  perl -E 'my @ary = (0, 1, undef, 3); while (defined(pop @ary)) {}; say join "|", @ary' Which is probably not what they wanted.

The only case in which it would make some sense to use that line with empty curlies would be if...

4. the entire thing is just that bad.