Don't use for(;;), it's a source of fencepost (or off-by-one) errors when you don't get your condition right. It's also the least efficient form of loop in Perl. Perl understands lists natively, so you should only rarely need counter variables to index an array. 
sub concat {
    my @s = @_;
    for (@s) {
        $_ .= "\t" if 8 > length;
    }
    return join "\t", @s; 
}

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Update: switched order on comparison operands.

Makeshifts last the longest.

In reply to Re^2: Concatenating strings with tabs between and returning the result by Aristotle
in thread Concatenating strings with tabs between and returning the result by Anonymous Monk

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