I agree, it's the kind of thing that screams out "Lisp!", but I just couldn't think of how to do it. Guess we'll have to leave it to the Lisp historians.

Update: Just in case anybody actually reads this and I'm not being clear, one can simulate the Perlish behavior simply by having a function like (defun fred (&rest args) (do-stuff-with args)). In fact, by treating args as a plist, one can simulate the Perl trick of passing a hash. What I can't see is how to get all the arguments as a list while still using Lisp's other facilities for handling them.