I can recommend Tom Christiansens' rant against prototyping on why in general you want to stay away from it, even though the article is about 5 years old now.

FMTEYEWTK on Prototypes in Perl

It used to be available as an article on perl.com too, but not any more.

In reply to Re(2): Calling subroutine syntax by bart
in thread Calling subroutine syntax by crabbdean

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