A list is, well, just that, a list, a bunch of values separated by commas.

You may be failing to address the confusion between what a list is with its literal representation in a program. After all a "bunch of values separated by commas" is considered a list literal, where the commas are mere notational conveniences. To the program itself, a list is a series of values, nevermind how they got there.

This is NOT a flame! It goes more to highlighting the difference between what a thing is (e.g., list), and what you have to write in a program to get one.

This particular distinction (or more precisely, the failure to understand it) caused more problems for me early on than maybe anything else (one exception: learning that my means local--in the C/C++ sense of the word--and that local really means localized global, or having a temporary local value for one But I digress).

Fortunately for me, Perl's forgiving nature (combined with its uncanny "do what I mean" quality) saved my skin more than once. But when I later went back to examine some of my old code, I could see evidence of my then-incomplete understanding of these concepts.

dmm

You can give a man a fish and feed him for a day ...
Or, you can teach him to fish and feed him for a lifetime