Style, readability and maintainability are much more important in most cases. That's why I always assign @_ to a list of lexicals, unless I'm coding a one-liner. In classes for tie, I often use shift and pop in examples. 

sub TIESCALAR { bless \(my $foo = pop), shift; }
sub STORE { ${ +shift } = pop }
sub FETCH { ${ +shift } }

###

sub foo {
    my ($self, $foo) = @_;
    ...
}

sub foobar {
    my ($self, %options) = @_;
    ...
}

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If I use @_ and the sub is small (5 lines or less), I do shift the object and then use @_, because that saves me an array. Besides, sometimes you want to change the values, in which case you have to use @_.

Some examples of things that I do not like: 
# Bad
sub foo {
    my $self = shift;
    ... not using @_ anymore
}
sub bar {
    my $self = shift;
    my %options = @_;
    ...
}

# Worse
sub foo {
    my $self = shift;
    my $foo = shift;
    my $bar = shift;
    ...
}

# Awful
sub foo {
    my $self = shift;
    my $foo = shift;
    ...
    my $bar = shift;
    ...
}

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I dislike anything using more than one shift. 

- Yes, I reinvent wheels.
- Spam: Visit eurotraQ.

In reply to Re: Shift versus Sanity by Juerd
in thread Shift versus Sanity by tadman

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