I was very intrigued by ikegami's post, so I went ahead and benchmarked the two approaches:

use Benchmark 'cmpthese';
cmpthese( -1,
          { x    => sub { my @list = ( 'N/A' ) x 14 },
            push => sub { my @list; push @list, $_ for 1 .. 14 } }
        );



          Rate times  push
x      89321/s    --  -23%
push  115925/s   30%    --
[download]

Where would I be without Benchmark?