I think the original post lacks a lot of things, and <code> is the least of them.
Had he used the <code> tags, compile errors would still appear.

The <code> tag would not make the comma show up on opendir lines neither help in resolving $workingDir to be $workDir or even $fileToLoad[$i] as an item of @filesToLoad

Since the question is not asking what on earth is the code doing or why it was not working, he challenged everyone tho write something that does the same, but smaller.

Add the square brackets to both scripts and the output will still be the same for both.