I've -- your posts. You seem to advocate the "lists in scalar context" meme. Context in Perl is important, and while confusing for some beginners, not that hard. Except when you're lured into thinking "lists in scalar context".
The fact you're troubled by context (and related things) is proven by your final question:
Finally, and for extra points (and points mean prizes), how does one describe the difference between a list and an array ?
This is actually quite easy. "Arrays" are something the Perl runtime really knows about. They are represented as AVs internally. They can be sliced and diced, passed around, changed, etc, etc. "Lists" however are a human thing - to make it easier to talk about code. Perl doesn't know about lists. It knows about list context. But what humans call a "list" is for Perl just a sequence of scalars in list context.
And once you understand that, you never think about lists in scalar context again. It just doesn't make sense. Lists are there because the context is "list context".
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