There's also short-cut for passing arrays to and from subs that you may come across. Consider the following example:

sub print_lengths {
  print scalar @$_, "\n" for @_;
}
my @a = qw( a b c d );
my @b = 1..8;
my @c = localtime;
print_lengths \( @a, @b, @c );  # notice the \ before the (
__END__
4
8
9
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I.e. \( @a, @b, @c ) is equivalent to ( \@a, \@b, \@c ). The \( ... ) evaluates to a list of references to the variables mentioned within the parentheses, as long as these are more than one. (I.e. \( @foo ) doesn't evaluate to \@foo; see perlref for more details.)