Ooff, just like I thought. I would have been really confused if it hadn't been this way.

BTW, OP: an excellent helper tool to see what Perl does to your data, is the standard module Data::Dumper:

use Data::Dumper;
print Dumper [qw(a b c)], \qw(a b c);
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Result:

$VAR1 = [
          'a',
          'b',
          'c'
        ];
$VAR2 = \'a';
$VAR3 = \'b';
$VAR4 = \'c';
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The "$VARn" notation is the default variable name that Data::Dumper makes for each argument passed to the sub Dumper. So here you have 4 arguments: the first is for [qw(a b c)], the other for each item in \qw(a b c). It is indeed a list of references, with 3 items.