note Aristotle Prototypes are one of those things that you shouldn't use, unless you understand why you shouldn't use them. Consider <code>sub foo ($$) { print join " / ", map "'$_'", @_; } my @x = qw(a b); foo(@x); </code> This will print <tt>'2'</tt>. Not <tt>'a' / 'b'</tt> as one might expect. Prototypes in Perl <b>aren't</b>. They would probably best be called "context coercion templates". A <tt>$</tt> will coerce anything into a scalar. List/hash flattening no longer applies. When using a single <tt>($)</tt>, it's not too bad, but if you use prototypes for more parameters, you can easily surprise users of that function (including yourself). The only "prototype" I'd seriously consider is <tt>&</tt>, which lets me pass a bare(!) BLOCK that implicitly becomes a subref to a closure to the function. <p align="right"><em>Makeshifts last the longest.</em></p> 194637 194637