Prototypes are one of those things that you shouldn't use, unless you understand why you shouldn't use them. Consider 
sub foo ($$) {
    print join " / ", map "'$_'", @_;
}

my @x = qw(a b);

foo(@x);

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This will print '2'. Not 'a' / 'b' as one might expect. Prototypes in Perl aren't. They would probably best be called "context coercion templates". A $ will coerce anything into a scalar. List/hash flattening no longer applies. When using a single ($), it's not too bad, but if you use prototypes for more parameters, you can easily surprise users of that function (including yourself). The only "prototype" I'd seriously consider is &, which lets me pass a bare(!) BLOCK that implicitly becomes a subref to a closure to the function.

Makeshifts last the longest.

In reply to Re: Are prototypes evil? by Aristotle
in thread Are prototypes evil? by Django

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