"strings really are "arrays" in C."

I know that you put the word arrays in quotes... the proper thinking is that "strings really are continuous memery space in c".

Any way, the real question is what is list/array. First, how Perl stores those different data structure internally (or more precisely c, not Perl) does not matter to Perl programmers, and more importantly, there is no structure in storage/memory, structure is just the way to interprete the stored bitmap. The concept of list bares no value at the bottom level, and expose no impact to consumers of the language.

There are at least three levels, and we have talked about the first two: the memory and the Perl internal (c). Now talk about the level you actually referred to - Perl. One sentence, doesn't matter how Perl organize things internally, you need to expose rich data structures to Perl programmers, and things like hash is not replaceable.