My argument is simply that using shift to extract several arguments is usually inefficient and, by induction, not very desirable: 
my ($foo_a) = @_;                       # Simple
my $foo_a = shift;                      # Comparable
my ($foo_a) = (shift);                  # Odd

my ($foo_a, $foo_b) = @_;               # Typical
my ($foo_a, $foo_b) = (shift, shift);   # Odder

my ($foo_a, $foo_b, $foo_c, $foo_d) = @_;
my ($foo_a, $foo_b, $foo_c, $foo_d) = (shift, shift, shift, shift);

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The last one is, I hope you'll agree, outrageous, and is best reserved for those sitations where you'd explain it, but it's a "long story".

I'm not saying that you shouldn't use shift. You can program any way you like. You can also use goto with impunity, variable names that make no sense, and use substr and unpack instead of regular expressions. What I'm suggesting is that using multiple shifts in a function is poor form and is a bad habit to develop.

Oh, and a goto by any other name still smells as rotten. I'd like to see any Benchmark that could show that using that technique you describe could provide measurable performance gains. As far as I can tell, passing the whole args array is fairly efficient. Pulling them apart and repacking them isn't.

In reply to Re^8: Shifty Politics by tadman
in thread stoping and restarting a loop by mnlight

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