prototypes can act as a check on the code to ascertain that function calls are performed properly, they indicate to Perl:
- Types of arguments the function can take.
- the number of arguments intended to be passed to the function.
(updated)
prototypes are flexible, you can also indicate to a function whether a certain prototype is optional and you can include references to hashes in there.
example:
sub NAME($$;$){...} #mistake corrected
this function expects 2 scalar arguments and one optional argument after the ";"...so bear in mind that not all of this is irrelevant and there will come a time when you'd better use a prototype in a function definition than pass it over.
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