As an example of the misery you may expect if you approach Perl prototypes with the mindset of a C or C++ programmer, consider the code below and see if you can explain what is happening – and then imagine it is embedded in the middle of thousands of lines of code. Note that the code has no errors and throws no warnings.

>perl -wMstrict -le
"sub S ($$) {
   my ($scalar, @array) = @_;
   return $scalar + $array[0];
   }
 my @ra = (9, 8, 7, 6);
 print S(3, @ra);
"
7
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