Item 9. Know the difference between lists and arrays

Lists and arrays are different things. If you can recognize when you have one or the other, along with the rules that apply to each, you’ll be far ahead of most people (and even most Perl books, for that matter). Some of the most powerful idioms in Perl depend on this difference.

A list is an ordered collection of scalars. You can construct lists yourself, get them as return values from built-ins and subroutines, or extract them from other lists.