You probably want to use splice which removes elements entirely from the array, rather than delete which only deletes their values:

perl> @a = (1 .. 10);;
perl> delete $a[ 3 ];;
perl> print "@a";;
Use of uninitialized value in join or string at
1 2 3  5 6 7 8 9 10

perl> @a = (1 .. 10);;
perl> splice @a, 3, 1;;
perl> print "@a";;
1 2 3 5 6 7 8 9 10
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