When creating large Perl scripts I like to restrict my freedom to make mistakes, that is after all why we always start scripts with: use strict; and run with -w.

I recently found out about the function prototype stuff (I know it has been there for a long while but I still have to run some of my scripts under Perl 4, so I am a bit behind the times).

So I put prototypes on all my subroutines, but they are not being checked since I like to visually flag my routines with & characters. Removing all the & characters doesn't work, sometimes the -w flag correctly points out things that are difficult for the interpreter to work out. So I end up removing most of the & characters but not all.

In addition the definition of prototypes does not behave as I would have expected. For example: 

sub fun1 ($;@)
  {
    my($cat,@vals) = @_;
    ...
  }

my(@args);
$args[0] = "type1";
push(@args,"a","b","c");
fun1(@args);

[download]

Sets $cat to 4 (the number of items in the list). Yes, upon reflection that is probably the right thing to do, but it is still not what I expected.

So my questions:

Thank you for your attention

In reply to Perl Prototypes by hawtin

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