in reply to When to use Prototypes?
As you well know, my answer to when to use prototypes is
generally, Don't!
And an example that I would point to of what the bugs caused by prototypes working as designed (rather than by their being buggy) look like in practice, take a look at printf vs. sprintf. How quickly could you, or more importantly a co-worker of yours, figure out what went wrong there? Why would you want to subject yourself to going wrong like that when you have a choice?
On whether prototypes are a bad idea, I don't think they are in a language where they do something reasonable. But they don't in Perl.
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