In my progress as a perl programmer, I started out with your first method, passing in a list of variables, and then grabbing them in that order in the subroutine.

As it got more advanced, I started using the second, (usually with a hash reference or something similar like you posted).

Then in some cases, where I keep passing the same value, since it does not change much, I found creating an object, blessing it, and making methods to do the work was a little easier to do.