As was pointed out in Conways article, it will help you to not think of perl prototypes as prototpes. Calling them prototypes was a mistake as they force most programmers that hae used other languages to view them (incorectly) as strict function argument specifiers. I guess the whole thing with why perl does not really support strict typing in the core is because that so much of the perl Do The Right Thing behavior relys on dynamicaly taking vars of different types and acting the right way. IMHO it is one of the wonderful things about this language.

-Waswas