Hmm, lets see...

You heard of perl's built-in functions, like print, printf, sprintf, split, substr.... right? (hopefully you've seen at least one of 'em).

What do they do? -- take a bunch of "parameters" and do stuff with them, whether it be "write" to some kind of "filehandle" or manipulate in some way.

Now do you see what "parameters" are for? (if you got a function that does something, would you rather call that function 5 times with different parameters, or write the code 5 different times)

 
___crazyinsomniac_______________________________________
Disclaimer: Don't blame. It came from inside the void
perl -e "$q=$_;map({chr unpack qq;H*;,$_}split(q;;,q*H*));print;$q/$q;"