As merlyn eluded to above, you can omit parens when you use a & in front of the function call. This has an interesting "side-effect" in that the local @_ is implicitly passed to that sub even though no arguments are explicitly passed. For instance: 

foo("\@_ has elements!");    # prints "Surprise! @_ has elements!"
bar("\@_ has no elements!"); # prints "Surprise!"

sub foo {
    # absent parens say pass my @_
    &baz;
}

sub bar {
    # parens say only pass these arguments (nothing)
    &baz();
}

sub baz {
    print "Surprise! ",join("\t",@_),"\n";
}

[download]
This can be handy when golfing but might cause anyone who looks at your code (including you!) some headaches...

--Brian

In reply to Re: What is the point of the & sigil for function refs? by bpphillips
in thread What is the point of the & / ampersand sigil for function refs? by tphyahoo

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