I use both. Depends on what I want. =) I tend to use the more compact form unless as you mentioned I'm going to provide alternates. One reason for using shift is if I'm going to do the elder-god level evil stunt of &subname and want to pass on all the other args to a second sub (that I choose based on the first arg).

In these modern, enlightened times, no one believes in that sort of nightmare anymore, we have gentler, happier gods... and references... and we read the rest of the camel book...

sub eek {
my ($selection)=@_;
$gsubhash{$selection}->(@_[1..$#_]);
}
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Of course, as I get older that seems like too much work. Now I just write one big linear script... =)

UPDATE Grr... thanks merlyn! As I recall, that is the mistake I had to fix a couple years ago when I actually used that idiom =)

--
$you = new YOU;
honk() if $you->love(perl)