The given example uses arrays of the same length, so pairwise looks fine to me.

And if they are not of the same length, I think the same way as JavaFan, that iswas left as an exercise to the reader. I don'tdidn't want to guess, what has to happen if the lengths differ. It's the OP who should know, what to do.

Nevertheless, thanks for your examples ;o)

Update:

What about this pairwise solution to work with arrays of different lengths:

use List::MoreUtils qw( pairwise );
my @a=(1 .. 5 );
my @b=( 'a' .. 'c'  );

### Good point from JavaFan; bad idea to ignore 0
### my @combined = pairwise { ( $a || '' ) .':'. ( $b || '' ) } @a, @b
+;

### fixed:
my @combined = pairwise { ( defined $a ? $a : '' ) .':'. ( defined $b 
+? $b : '' ) } @a, @b;

{
  local $,="\n",
  print @combined;
}
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