On IRC and here at perlmonks, I often see people get "corrected" when they call their functions (theirs, not Perl's built-in functions) with a leading ampersand. I'm not talking about using &foo, I'm talking about using &foo(...).

What's the problem? I don't believe people are really concerned that these beginners are avoiding the prototypes of their functions, because 95% of the time, I also hear "don't use prototypes". So what's the problem with calling user-defined subroutines with an ampersand? Yes, it's optional, but it's not detrimental.

Jeff japhy Pinyan, P.L., P.M., P.O.D, X.S.: Perl, regex, and perl hacker
How can we ever be the sold short or the cheated, we who for every service have long ago been overpaid? ~~ Meister Eckhart

In reply to What's so bad about &function(...)? by japhy

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