Call it an indulgance :)

I call it "confusing" because, well, it confuses me. :-)

Afterall, they aren't really subs, right? You can have more than one BEGIN (et al) block without concern for redefining previous ones. And, my $arg = shift; will shift off @ARGV rather than @_ as you would expect in a sub. Heck, you can't even explicitly call it!¹ And in those ways, they differ significantly from TIE* and family.

Frankly, and maybe I shouldn't admit this, I was surprised putting sub in front even worked. I always think of BEGIN, INIT, CHECK, and END as "special blocks" in a category of their own. I think I've been led that way by the documentation which uses the term "block" to describe them.

1. And trying to opened up a real can of worms. Apparently, even

sub main::BEGIN { print "X\n" }
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*main::BEGIN = sub { print "X\n" };
&BEGIN;
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*main::BEGIN = sub { print "X\n" };
BEGIN();
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*main::BEGIN = sub () { print "X\n" };
BEGIN();
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perl -e 'BEGIN'    # Syntax error. 
perl -e 'BEGIN;    # No error.
perl -e 'BEGIN()'  # Syntax error.
perl -e 'BEGIN();' # No error.
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After all this, I'm inclined to think that sub BEGIN should be treated as an error if not a regular subroutine. (Of course, given the current state of affairs, we couldn't exactly start treating it as a regular subroutine now, could we? So I think it should be an error.)

-sauoq
"My two cents aren't worth a dime.";