Why are the comma's excluded in some spots and not others?

They're not excluded... you may have completely misunderstood some of the syntactic forms.

  map {/dothis/} @variable;
  grep {/more stuff/} @more;
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That's roughly equivalent to:

  map(sub {/dothis/}, @variable);
  grep(sub {/more stuff/}, @more);
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except that map() and grep() play with $_ on your behalf.

As for:

  print A "hello";
  print $somevar, "can be seperated like this";
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The second print statement is equivalent to

  print STDOUT $somevar, "can be seperated like this";
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.. unless you've called select() to change which is the default filehandle.

How does this work with your own prototypes and subroutines?

Prototypes allow the Perl parser to apply (for your subs) the same parser tricks it employs on built-in functions (like push()).

Which perldoc covers this in depth?

perlsyn, perlsub, perlfunc should do it.

-David

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