The prototypes allow you to skip your parentheses, which makes the sub act more like a built-in. Since you said you wanted a built-in, I thought I'd fake it as well as can be done.

I personally believe you'll find that you don't need prototypes at all, to allow one to skip parens:

C:\temp>cat mkaref.pl
#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;

sub mkaref { [@_] }

print Dumper mkaref qw<foo bar baz>;

__END__

C:\temp>mkaref.pl
$VAR1 = [
          'foo',
          'bar',
          'baz'
        ];
[download]

However I did hope it was clear enough that my "quest" is not for builtin (looking) functions, because in that case I can write them myself full well, but for builtin (hypothetical) syntax.