Re: Are prototypes evil?

[lestrrat]

I think when they are called for ( such as when you described "... I like the ability to use subs like built-ins.." ), they can be good. The reason most people that I know detest them is because it gives you false sense of security

For example, you may think that a sub foo($) would force perl to raise an error if you passed an array to it. But this produces no errors:

   my @list = qw/ foo bar baz /;
   foo( @list );

instead, you get size of the list.

I find this to be extremely dangerous, because a lot of people expect "prototypes" to work sort of like C/C++/Java prototypes, and what's worse, it sometimes seems to work that way as well (For example, foo($a,$b) would in fact generate an error)

That's exactly why I don't like them, and almost never use them except for in esoteric cases. At the very least, I think the use should NOT be encouraged.