I understand that coming from a Lisp background you'll immediately look for a cons-like data type, but once you realize that arrays are about as dynamic as cons-lists, you'll see why none of the major scripting languages implement them.

An improvement over the current Perl array implementation might be to implement it as a (linked) list of C pointer arrays instead of a C pointer array, much like a cons-list or rather a degenerate n-ary tree with n-1 leaves and 1 child node at every level. But so far, the need hasn't been really sufficient to drive people to implement this.