1nickt gave you a solution, just to explain what's going on: In Perl, arguments to subroutines/methods are by default flattened into one big list. So for example, if you have an array my @x = ('y', 'z'); and a function call like func(a=>@x, b=>'c');, and considering that the => is just a special kind of comma, what the function ends up getting called with is ('a', 'y', 'z', 'b', 'c'). This flattening is described in perlsub. To learn more about references, which are scalars and won't get flattened, see perlreftut.

A few minor updates for clarification.