Perl: array reference versus anonymous array

Question

This may be a silly question... The following code outputs the contents of @arrayref and @arraycont respectively. Note the difference between them

Answer 1

This creates a shallow copy of the array:

$arraycont[0] = [@array];

Whereas this just creates a reference to it:

$arrayref[0] = \@array;

Since you later modify the array:

@array = qw(5 6 7 8);

arrayref still points to the same array location in memory, and so when dereferenced in the print statements it prints the current array values 5 6 7 8.