There are a couple of modules that you can use if you need fancier list handling in Perl. After all, many programs really are just a series of moving lists around in various ways.

The List::Util module comes with the Standard Library and provides high-performance versions of common list processing utilities. These are implemented at the C level.

Suppose you wanted to know if a list contains an item that matches some condition. You don’t need to get all of the elements, and you want to stop once you find the first matching element. You can’t use grep because it always scans the entire list, and if your list is very long the grep might do a lot of extra, unnecessary work: