I would agree. The only "advantage" to doing the hashref / dereference / slice trick is that one avoids the %args hash; frankly, I don't consider that an advantage at all. Most of the time when I pass args to a function as a hash, I simply use the %args hash in the function, instead of pulling specific values out and stuffing them into scalars. I like to think that this makes for better maintainability and scalability.

But to each their own..

perl -pe '"I lo*`+$^X$\"$]!$/"=~m%(.*)%s;$_=$1;y^`+*^e v^#$&V"+@( NO CARRIER'