I asked a similar question at the end of Re^5: Gratuitous use of Perl Prototypes but never received an answer.

Also, I originally used the same approach in Re: More functional programming utilities, but eventually decided for that purpose that multimap \( @a, @b, @c, @d, ... ); was preferable as it meant I could pass anonymous arrays and other similar constructs. Eg. multimap [...],[...];, whereas the prototype version insists upon real arrays.