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*