Consider your output, if @array1 and @array2 are swapped, making @array2 the longer of the two.

But one can make that output slightly more elegant (a matter of taste, of course; YMMV) by using the ternary again in print statements which make visual allowance for non-existent indices:

for(my $index=0; $index<$max_array_length; $index++) {
    print $array1[$index] ? $array1[$index] : '  ';
    print ", ";
    print $array2[$index] ? $array2[$index] : '-';
    print "\n";
}
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