I quite like that one. I came close to that but missed (actually, simply wasn't aware of) the @{\@array) 'trick'.

However (you knew that was coming right?), as I can do:

my (@a1,@a2) = ([1,2,3],[3,2,1]);
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Update: the above line doesn't work after all

I had tried:

my (@a1,@a2) = ([1,2,3,4,5,6,7],[7,6,5,4,3,2,1]);
print Dumper(@a1), Dumper(@a2);
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which gave:

$VAR1 = [
          1,
          2,
          3,
          4,
          5,
          6,
          7
        ];
$VAR2 = [
          7,
          6,
          5,
          4,
          3,
          2,
          1
        ];
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print "a1\n", Dumper(@a1), "a2\n", Dumper(@a2);
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That I saw what tstock meant below.

Thanks tstock, I'll be more careful in future with my quick tests. (I agree about the loop/if being better too.)

end of update

Which personally I find a very clear yet concise way of declaring and initialising two arrays. It still seems as if something close to:

my ( @dirs, @files)= 
   ( @{-d}, @{-f} ) for (readdir DIR);
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could be possible if I could only get the syntactic sugar right!

This is only an exercise in my trying to understand arrays and list contexts etc. ie. Its essentially a purely academic excercise for late (for me) on a Sunday evening, and so not worthy of anyone's time unless they are also in play mode.