From: Rafael Garcia-Suarez <rgarciasuarez@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 25 Mar 2008 22:06:12 GMT
Subject: Re: [PATCH] gitweb: Uniquify usage of subroutine prototypes
Message-ID: <b77c1dce0803251506y443aab5uf0134a47e9cf28de@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <7vlk46lh61.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>

On 25/03/2008, Junio C Hamano <junio@pobox.com> wrote:
>  I am not saying that Perl prototypes is a bad thing.  The point of the
>  prototype is to change the syntax and semantics so that you can write a
>  function to which arguments are _not_ passed as a flattend list, and
>  without them you cannot write something that emulates "push @a, $b, $c".

I would agree with what Junio says here. The primary motivation of
prototypes was to emulate the syntax of perl built-ins, and their
extension (with the _ character) in Perl 5.10 has followed this
general principle. As a general rule, I tend to avoid using prototypes
for 'normal' functions. That's mostly an application of the least
surprise principle.