It's not a limitation of Perl at all. At least for some values of “limitation”.

The cause of this is that there is no two dimensional array in Perl. You are constructing a representation of such by using an array of arrays, but a one-dimensional array of one-dimensional arrays is not the same as a two dimensional array. There are fewer constraints on such a data structure (the subarrays need not be uniform in length) but in turn, it also loses some expressiveness since you only address one array at a time. You can still represent all operations possible on a two-dimesional array using an array of arrays, but it does require looping.

To do what the OP wants to do, it would also have to be possible to say @{ \@a, \@b, \@c }[ 3 ], which it is not.

Makeshifts last the longest.