Prototypes are one of those things that you shouldn't use, unless you understand why you shouldn't use them. Consider
sub foo ($$) {
print join " / ", map "'$_'", @_;
}
my @x = qw(a b);
foo(@x);
This will print
'2'. Not
'a' / 'b' as one might expect. Prototypes in Perl
aren't. They would probably best be called "context coercion templates". A
$ will coerce anything into a scalar. List/hash flattening no longer applies. When using a single
($), it's not too bad, but if you use prototypes for more parameters, you can easily surprise users of that function (including yourself). The only "prototype" I'd seriously consider is
&, which lets me pass a bare(!) BLOCK that implicitly becomes a subref to a closure to the function.
Makeshifts last the longest.