I like to think of the difference between lists and arrays thus

• Lists are immutable, once constructed/created, you can't change them. You can copy them to another list, create new lists from parts of the original, etc. But you can't change the list.
• Arrays are true variables - you shift off the front, push onto the back, splice out of the middle - change it anyway you want.

So operations that modify the length of a 'list' require an array. The camel book says you can think of an array as a variable and a list as its values.

Note that you can assign to an element of a list e.g.

($a, $b, $c) = @_;
[download]

but you can never change that list - you can't add another value, delete a value to make a shorter list or make one of the elements refer to a different variable. It is forever a list of 3 variables, $a, $b and $c.

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.