I was led to believe that you could assign the number of arguments being fed into a subroutine as well as the arguments themselves into a) a scalar and b) an array in the following manner:

#!/usr/bin/perl5 -w
my $theValue;
$theValue = Routine(42);
print "$theValue";
sub Routine
{
  my ($argCount,@argValues) = @_;
  return $_0;              # returns 42.
  # return $argCount;      # returns 42 but I would have
                           # thought it would return 1
                           # (representing the number of
                           # arguments received).
  # return $argValues[0];  # this doesn't work at all
                           # but I would have thought
                           # it would return 42.
}

[download]
When I try this, however, it becomes clear to me (I think) that the argument is actually getting assigned to $argCount instead of to $argValues[0] (contrary to what I was led to believe).

Does anyone have any suggestions?

In reply to ( my ($argCount,@argValues) = @_ ) == Bad Idea? by Anonymous Monk

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