my @array = (
  "Hibbs",
  "Daglish",
  "Schwartz",
  "Vroom",
);
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I agree. And the little thing that makes this really work well is training oneself to add that trailing comma (after "Vroom") to the last entry. (Ditto for hashes entries, too.)

I don't like the push way of constructing arrays.

You think that's bad, I once had to maintain a program that did this:

my @array;
$array[$#array] = "Hibbs";
$array[$#array] = "Daglish";
$array[$#array] = "Schwartz";
$array[$#array] = "Vroom";
...
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One of the few times I felt justified in regexing some code.

Woah, woah, woah. That code just replaces the last element multiple times. Did you maybe mean

$array[@array] = "Hibbs";
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or

$array[++$#array] = "Hibbs";
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?

---

Caution: Contents may have been coded under pressure.

Nope, I meant what I said, believe it or not. The program never worked correctly, and that was one of many reasons why. (No strict, either.) Amazingly, this one dude had been working on it for six weeks before I saw it.

Now to get back some of that lost XP by upvoting the helpful replies...
 ah, I like being a Friar anyway, it goes with my T-shirt.

you don't have to merely trust; it's documented in perldata:

You may have an optional comma before the closing parenthesis of a list literal

In fact, you can have extra commas anywhere you want in a list except (for reasons I can't explain) at the very front of it. They will not cause undef items to be created, nor will including nested empty lists.

my @items = ((),,,,5);
print "<$_>\n" for @items;
# prints only one item
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---

Caution: Contents may have been coded under pressure.

Actually it does work in C, and that's most likely where perl picked up the habit too. One reason it's very useful is when you're generating code with macros, it's much easier to append commas to things than to insert them between things.

--
integral, resident of freenode's #perl

I use the former idiom as well, but I've run across this style a couple of times, too:

my @array = (
   'Hibbs'
  ,'Daglish'
  ,'Schwartz'
  ,'Vroom'
);
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The one time I had the chance to actually ask a coder about that style, he gave me two rationales. First, he liked it because of a string-cat convention that's similar:

my $string =
   'this is a very long string that has a certain number '
  .$number
  .' of segments.'
  ."\n";
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In print statements, this coder often mirrored that convention using commas instead of periods to pass the list of strings to print. (This is apparently faster, though it smacks of premature optimization to me. But I digress.)

The second reason was that he found the trailing comma to be confusing; by moving commas to the front, he provided a visual reminder to put the comma in when adding to the list but without the "confusing" trailing comma. To each their own, I guess.

Anyone have thoughts on this style? Just curious as to what advantages/disadvantages there might be.

That doesn't really help here since you can't insert at the top safely.

The style has been called The Perlish Coding Style. Accoding to that document, the following would be the proper alignment:

{ my @array = ( 'Hibbs'
              , 'Daglish'
              , 'Schwartz'
              , 'Vroom'    )

; my $string = 'this is a very long string that has a certain number '
             . $number
             . ' of segments.'
             . "\n"
}
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