hey--
I am working on my first project using OO perl, and have a quick question. I have several different files (some of which are very large) that are simple word lists-- words separated by a comma and a space. The idea is that I want to load all of the words from a file into an array via a method. The following code seems to do what I want:

sub words_from_file {
    my $self = shift;
    my $file_path = shift;
    my @word_list;
    open WORD_FILE, "< $file_path"
    or die "Could not open $file_path:  $!\n";
    while (<WORD_FILE>) {
        chomp;
        push @word_list, split ", ";
    }
    \@word_list;
}
[download]

However, I am not at all sure that this is the best way to implement the functionality I want. In terms of security and speed, do you all have any suggestions? Are there file tests I should be making before the open? Should I do something involving tie to the filehandle to speed things up? (I know nothing about tie so I'm not even sure if that last question made sense :) Is there any benefit to using return \@word_list instead of what I've done in the last line?

just looking for any feedback before I get too much further into this,
--au