This is my take, which really is a guess, but hopefully a qualified one.

I'll first pull out two strings from perlop:

• About =>: As of release 5.001, it also forces any word to the left of it to be interpreted as a string.
• About unary -: One effect of these rules is that -bareword is equivalent to "-bareword".

Before 5.001, using an unary - with a bareword in the argument list was a trick to not have to quote it. As of 5.001, this trick was no longer needed since => already did that for you. So I believe that the dash style is a historical left-over.

ihb

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