I need a Perl way to find the maximum string length in an array so here is a function to do that:

my @words = qw(Apple Pear Watermelon Banana Cherry);
my $max   = max_length(@words); # 10

sub max_length {
    my $max = 0;

    foreach my $item (@_) {
        my $len = length($item);
        if ($len > $max) {
            $max = $len;
        }
    }

    return $max;
}