You're assigning a refernce to an array into an array.

Ummm, no. He's assigning a list of references into an array.

#!/usr/bin/perl -l
my @a = qw(a b c);
my @b = \(@a);
print "\@a contains: @a";
print "\@b contains: @b";
__END__
@a contains: a b c
@b contains: SCALAR(0x811b15c) SCALAR(0x811b240) SCALAR(0x811b294)
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What you are thinking of is [ LIST ].