sub total{
        my $sum = shift(@_);
        foreach (@_){
                $sum += $_;
                }
  return $sum;
}
[download]

• add $_, not @_
• return $sum
• Add trailing } to match braces

Awesome! Fixed the problem--thanks much! I didn't know if Perl associated the default $_ while moving through the indices of @_.

The mechanism of action is the foreach loop. It's just as happy aliasing $_ to elements of @this, @that, and @the_other as well. In this regard, @_ isn't special; foreach is.

perlsyn




Dave

perlintro#foreach

Hello squimby, and welcome to the Monastery!

Any tips for 'Perl'ifying this?

Building on NetWallah’s answer:

sub total
{
    my $sum = shift;
    $sum += $_ for @_;
    return $sum;
}
[download]

See shift and Statement Modifiers.

Update: Also read-up on $_ in General Variables.

Hope that helps,

One of the trickiest notions in Perl is the issue of contexts.   When you wrote $sum += @_, you used an @array value in a $scalar context.   That changes what it does.

For debugging such things, I would insert a statement within the loop that prints useful information to the STDERR file, e.g.:
  print STDERR "sum is $sum\n";.

All interactive programs have two output streams, STDOUT and STDERR, the latter intended for error or diagnostic outputs.

Also, get used to now putting these two statements at the start of every program:
  use strict;
  use warnings;

another solution:

sub total {
   my $sum =0;

    map { $sum += $_ } @_;
    return $sum;

}
[download]

Let's fold a list.

use List::Util 'reduce';

sub total {
  return reduce { $a + $b } 0, @_;
}
[download]

The above code hardly even resembles Perl as I know it. Got a lot to learn... I've heard at work they use 'map' regularly (I wouldn't say 'frequently'--something about it not processing efficiently with mysql in some contexts). I'll need to read up on that.