Context, context, context.

The foreach keyword is actually a synonym for the for keyword, so you can use foreach for readability or for for brevity.

and then later:

And it's faster because Perl executes a foreach statement more rapidly than it would the equivalent for loop.

That second quote (yours) is in regards to for ($i = 0; $i < @array; $i++) { $array[$i] ... } vs. foreach (@array) { $_ ... }