No, that much is clearly understood. What I mean is that with respect to function prototypes, passing an array to a scalar prototype would seem to be a type mismatch, although these are kind of relative in such a loosely typed language as Perl. You'd hope for a warning, perhaps. You've asked for a scalar, but you're getting a list.

What I was expecting was that the @foo array would be expanded into the brackets in the function call and passed through as a list, but Perl appears to be doing some truly clever things to try and handle the prototype, taking it to the ultimate extreme.

Update:
japhy and everyone else who has been kind enough to post remarks on this subject is 100% correct, of course. What led to this insight into prototypes was one part ass, one part you, one part me, and we all know what that adds up to.

The counter-intuitive component of this is that I'd expected an automatic array-to-list conversion to be peformed before said list is then passed to the prototype, but this is not the case. A list of an array is not the same as a list of the array elements.

In reply to Re^2: Function Prototype Context Conversion by tadman
in thread Function Prototype Context Conversion by tadman

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