Agreed. I just wanted to indicate I was aware of prototypes. (I didn't feel a more in-depth discussion on them was needed to answer the question given.)

But yeah, prototypes cause the function to apply different contexts to their arguments (except when they don't) and so they can appear to take something other than a list. Unless you ignore the prototype. Or work around it some way. Or...

End result, for this discussion: Prototypes in Perl don't actually help all that much with static code analysis. They can help a bit, but not enough to make code analysis really useful.