You could "name" your first parameter by assigning its value to a lexical. Like chomp(my $param = $_[0]);. But that's not really much change, and that's up to you.

However, there is a problem with your code. The "return" statement exits the sub immediatly, and everything below that point is skipped. Besides, you assign the result of fetchrow_array() to an array that you never use (you could have written return $sth->fetchrow_array();). If you want the end of the sub to be run, you should have something like:

sub get_loc {
    ...
    my @loc = $sth->fetchrow_array();
    $sth->finish;
    $dbh->disconnect
        or die "Error disconnecting: $DBI::errstr\n";
    return @loc;
}
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