While the use of the angle brackets here is strange and unnecessary, I don't see how it breaks the original code. I tried it, and it works fine with Perl 5.6.1. I thought that maybe the while on <@list> would maybe only work once; i.e.; the first end-of-list would behave like and EOF and have to be reset somehow. But that's not the case in my tests.

my @x = (qw/a b c abc def ghi z/);

while (<@x>)
{
    print "<$_>\n";
}

print "\n\n";

while (<@x>)
{
    print "<$_>\n";
}
[download]

<a>
<b>
<c>
<abc>
<def>
<ghi>
<z>


<a>
<b>
<c>
<abc>
<def>
<ghi>
<z>
[download]