1. Well ... but it's the aliases that are "passed" to the subroutine. When you do

sub foo {
 my ($foo, $bar) = @_;
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you are assigning the values from the references/aliases passed to the subroutine to some lexical variables. The $foo and $bar are not the subroutine parameters, they are plain old lexicals that got their value from the parameters.

2. I see. I've never worked with PHP so I did not know :-)

Jenda
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.
   -- Rick Osborne

Edit by castaway: Closed small tag in signature