Right, I was commenting on tilly's statement that reversing the order is a good way to silently ignore the prototype.

However, I wonder if the documentation in perlmod should be revised from:

A BEGIN subroutine is executed as soon as possible, that is, the moment it is completely defined, even before the rest of the containing file is parsed.

To something like:

A BEGIN subroutine is executed as soon as possible, that is, the moment it is completely defined, even before subsequent code is parsed, but after the code before it is parsed and compiled.

   MeowChow                                   
               s aamecha.s a..a\u$&owag.print