Calling a list a speial type of array is a little misleading. An array is a variable, a list is not. In your example:
@list1 = (1,2,3,4); 
@list2 = (list1, list2, list3, list4); 
@arr1 = ("1" , "2", "3", "4"); 
@arr2 = ("arr1", "arr2", "arr3", "arr4") ;

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@list1, @list2, @arr1, and @arr2, are all arrays. In all your examples the right hand side of the assignments are lists, although the list (list1, list2, list3, list4) is questionable, since it contains bare words which might be interpreteted as subroutine calls. To ensure text you can autoquote each word using qw, for example:
my @arr3 = qw(value1 value2 value3 value4);

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qw returns a list (in an old release it used to return an array, and that was considered to be a bug).

Fortunately you can assign the items in a list to an array, as you have. When we do this kind of assignment it is essentially a copy of the items on the right hand side into elements in the array.

You can assign to a list on the left side, provided the list only consists of variables (although undef is a special case). For example:
my @arr5 = qw (quick brown fox);
my ($speed, $colour, $animal) = @arr5;

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will assign the three values to the array, then assign from the array into the three variables $speed, $colour, $animal arranged in a list.

In reply to Re: difference between array and list in perl by cdarke
in thread difference between array and list in perl by manishrathi

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