We had many trolls recently, but IMHO this question regarding perldsc is legit.

For example:

Count how many times my is missing here

    
Declaration of an ARRAY OF ARRAYS

@AoA = (
       [ "fred", "barney" ],
       [ "george", "jane", "elroy" ],
       [ "homer", "marge", "bart" ],
     );

Generation of an ARRAY OF ARRAYS

# reading from file
while ( <> ) {
    push @AoA, [ split ];
}

# calling a function
for $i ( 1 .. 10 ) {
    $AoA[$i] = [ somefunc($i) ];
}

# using temp vars
for $i ( 1 .. 10 ) {
    @tmp = somefunc($i);
    $AoA[$i] = [ @tmp ];
}

# add to an existing row
push $AoA[0]->@*, "wilma", "betty";

Access and Printing of an ARRAY OF ARRAYS

# one element
$AoA[0][0] = "Fred";

# another element
$AoA[1][1] =~ s/(\w)/\u$1/;

# print the whole thing with refs
for $aref ( @AoA ) {
    print "\t [ @$aref ],\n";
}

# print the whole thing with indices
for $i ( 0 .. $#AoA ) {
    print "\t [ $AoA[$i]->@* ],\n";
}

# print the whole thing one at a time
for $i ( 0 .. $#AoA ) {
    for $j ( 0 .. $AoA[$i]->$#* ) {
        print "elem at ($i, $j) is $AoA[$i][$j]\n";
    }
}
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> > > Many of the examples also run fine in the absence of strict and warnings.

And they still would with my declarations for all Perl 5 versions, even without 'use strict'.

update

But they would fail for versions not supporting ->@* and ->#* , which makes the backwards compatibility argument even more dubious.