I'd say the specification of create is incomplete. Prototyping does act surprisingly because it goes against the list flattening you'd expect from unprototyped functions. Not specifying that a function is prototyped, or not saying that the first argument will be evaluated in scalar context means, IMO, that the description is incomplete (and hence wrong).

I only use prototypes if there are clear benefits (\@ and & prototypes, sometimes a prototype with a single $ (which changes the way perl compiles your Perl)). But often it's too much of a nuisance.

I also don't agree with your reasoning that with such a simple description of create you should use $array[0] Take a look at the description of POSIX::strftime. With your reasoning, the proper way of calling it would be:

    use POSIX;
 
    my @chunks = localtime;
    print strftime "some format", $chunks [0], $chunks [1], $chunks [2
+],
                                  $chunks [3], $chunks [4], $chunks [5
+],
                                  $chunks [6], $chunks [7], $chunks [8
+];
[download]

instead of

    print strftime "some format", localtime;
[download]

strftime could have been prototyped as $$$$$$$;$$$; the description doesn't say it's not, and spells out the arguments for strftime.

Abigail