honestly, it's a simple matter of style. i prefer the look of it. i have a habit of not destroying things when i don't have to, but that's not the real reason. really, i like declaring variables with a single my.

for some history on shift vs. @_, see tilly's Silly code reviews and shift, which started with How to pass a variable to function selected from a hash.

for a debate, see tadman's Shift versus Sanity

~Particle *accelerates*

unless, of course, you add your variables by

## start with:
my $foo = shift;

## adding $bar yields:
my $foo = shift; 
my $bar = shift;
[download]

it's a matter of style. if you're changing your style, it's safer to rewrite the code from scratch than to modify in place -- even (or especially) if it's only one statement.

~Particle *accelerates*

Huh? I thought it was rather clear from the documentation that shift doesn't care if you're using list context. It just always takes the first element off an array and returns it. What made you think otherwise?

my $this = shift;
my $x = shift;
...
[download]