Yes, you can use the '&' symbol to call your subroutines (ie: &foo;), but IMO it makes things uglier.

Not only does it make it uglier, it also doesn't do the same thing. The issue is covered in perlfaq7, "What's the difference between calling a function as &foo and foo()?". I pointed out the very same thing in Re: Hash of Hash of Listed subroutines but then in the context of dereferencing subroutines. For some reason, it's much more common to drop the parenthesis when dereferencing than when making a regular subroutine call.

ihb

In reply to Re: Re: Forward-referenceing subs by ihb
in thread Forward-referenceing subs by John M. Dlugosz

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.