Are you sure you are quoting Learning Perl fairly? I suspect that what you saw was 

my ($blah) = @_;

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which, like 
my $blah = shift;

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assigns the first element of @_ to $blah, although the form using shift has the additional effect of removing this first element from @_. Or maybe you saw 
my @blah = @_;

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which assigns all of @_ to the array @blah.

In contrast, what you quoted, 

my $blah = @_;

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just assigns to $blah the size of @_.

BTW, golfers are partial to pop: 

my $blah = pop;

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or perhaps I should say 
$b=pop;

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which is equivalent to shift when @_ has length 1 (or 0), butsavesem2strokes.

the lowliest monk

In reply to Re: Subroutines: @_ and shift by tlm
in thread Subroutines: @_ and shift by ghenry

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