There's much more perlish reason not modify the arguments of sub by default. If you don't, you can write stuff like this: 
other_function(decode 'latin-1', 'string_literal'))
# and if you want to change a variable
$var = decode('latin-1', $var);

[download]

On the other hand if you do change the the arguments of the sub, the first one requires another variable, which is a real kludge (visually, at least) 

do {
   my $var = 'string_literal';
   decode('latin-1', $var);
   other_function($var);
}
# and the other one
decode('latin-1', $var)

[download]

In reply to Re^2: No garbage collection for my-variables by moritz
in thread No garbage collection for my-variables by betterworld

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