roboticus wrote:

If you check the docs (perldoc -f die), you'll see that's the intended behavior. ...

Actually, I did read the perldoc for die and the only thing I saw about stringification was this:

Because Perl stringifies uncaught exception messages before display, you'll probably want to overload stringification operations on exception objects.

That isn't exactly obvious that it has anything to do with @_ or that die() is doing anything or what the intended behavior is with respect to @_.

... It's not "bad practice" to pass in a list.

The reason I asked about "bad practice" is shown in the example below. Passing a list to a parameter will cause the second element of the list to go to the next parameter. In the original example it appears that @_ is always just a single item but this is confusing for anyone who maintains or reuses this code. I guess I just answered my own question; This is a very bad practice.

use strict;
use warnings;

my @array1 = ( "this is a line\n", "this is a second line");
my @array2 = qw( one two three);

sub1 ( @array1 );

sub sub1 {

    send_status_email('xxx@yy.com', 'subject',@_, \@array2);
}

sub send_status_email {

    my ($to_address, $status, $message, $ar_attachments ) = @_;
    print "To:     $to_address\n";
    print "Status: $status\n";
    print "Message <$message>\n";
    foreach ( @$ar_attachments ) {
        print "ar: $_\n";
    }
    print "***************** sub finished\n";
}

__END__

** output **

To:     xxx@yy.com
Status: subject
Message <this is a line
>
Can't use string ("this is a second line") as an ARRAY ref while "stri
+ct refs" in use at C:\usr\dms\perl\test_sub_array.pl line 20.
[download]

UPDATE: Ignore this... I'm not sure how I missed that you were pointing out the bad example of how not to use @_.

You are passing @_ as the third argument to send_status_email followed by \@array2. Since @_ contains two items and send_status_email is expecting a scalar for the third argument, the second item in @_ is going into $ar_attachments. Here is one way to fix that:

use strict;
use warnings;

my @array1 = ( "this is a line\n", "this is a second line");
my @array2 = qw( one two three);

sub1 ( @array1 );

sub sub1 {
    send_status_email( 'xxx@yy.com', 'subject', \@_, \@array2);
}

sub send_status_email {

    my ($to_address, $status, $message, $ar_attachments ) = @_;
    print "To:     $to_address\n";
    print "Status: $status\n";
    my $body = join '', @$message;
    print "Message <$body>\n";
    foreach ( @$ar_attachments ) {
        print "ar: $_\n";
    }
    print "***************** sub finished\n";
}

__END__
To:     xxx@yy.com
Status: subject
Message <this is a line
this is a second line>
ar: one
ar: two
ar: three
***************** sub finished
[download]