I believe the reason is this: You are receiving the input in list context. Therefore when you enter '2 3 4' it is being recieved as a string and the array has only one element. Now, when you iterate through your 1 element array, you are trying to use it as a number, but since the one element '2 3 4' is a string, only the 2 is being used. It would be better to do something like this:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;

my @names = qw/ fred betty barney dino wilma peblles bamm-bamm /;
chomp( my $list = <STDIN>);
my @list = split(" ", $list);

foreach (@list) {
    print " $names[ $_ - 1]\n";
}

exit;
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davidj