Then again, that might only happen at run-time.
That's not a "might", it's bullseye.
The compiler cannot know what's going to happen. You might think it will; if you see foo(@bar) and the prototype is ($), it's obviously a violation, right? But what happens when I have foo(bar())? In fact, the function might return a single return value some of the time and multiple ones at other times. There's no way for the compiler to know. It can only be determined at runtime. Prototypes as they're known from statically, strongly typed languages are not possible in Perl due to the very nature of the language.
Makeshifts last the longest.
