When you said while (<@dataarray>), I shuddered.

Indeed, when I saw it, I thought the code had not been really tested as claimed, for I could have bet it would have yielded an error. But this doesn't seem to be the case:

$ perl -MO=Deparse -e '@a=qw/a b c/; print while <@a>'
@a = ('a', 'b', 'c');
use File::Glob ();
print $_ while defined($_ = glob(join($", @a)));
-e syntax OK
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and actually IMHO by virtue of an (un?)fortunate chance:

$ perl -le '@a=qw/a b c/; print while <@a>'
a
b
c
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It seems that while (<whatever>)'s magic applies even if those angular parens are not to be interpreted as the IO-diamond operator but as the glob one. Now I wonder if this is a (perhaps unavoidable) side-effect or if it is intentional, although I doubt about the latter possibility.

Well, this may be a good subject for another question, or for a meditation... Update: done!