In trying to understand the splat operator, I visited:
http://theplana.wordpress.com/2007/03/03/ruby-idioms-the-splat-operator/

The first example that site offers is:
   The split mode :
   pet1, pet2, pet3 = *["duck","dog","cat"]

That resulted in pet1 == "duck", etc

But so did:
   pet1, pet2, pet3 = ["duck","dog","cat"] # no splat operator
and#
   pet1, pet2, pet3 = "duck","dog","cat" # no array-literal markers

So this first example makes no sense, does it?  What am I missing?

Thanks in Advance,
Richard