What is a good equivalent to Perl lists in bash?

bash (unlike POSIX sh) supports arrays:

fruits=(apple orange kiwi "dried mango")
for fruit in "${fruits[@]}"; do
  echo "${fruit}"
done

This has the advantage that array elements may contain spaces or other members of $IFS; as long as they were correctly inserted as separate elements, they are read out the same way.

Like this:

FRUITS="apple orange kiwi"
for FRUIT in $FRUITS; do
  echo $FRUIT
done

Notice this won't work if there are spaces in the names of your fruits. In that case, see this answer instead, which is slightly less portable but much more robust.