Is there a difference between Perl's shift versus assignment from @_ for subroutine parameters?

Question

Let us ignore for a moment Damian Conway\'s best practice of no more than three positional parameters for any given subroutine.

Is there any difference between the t

Answer 1

The best way, IMHO, is a slight mixture of the two, as in the new function in a module:

our $Class;    
sub new {
    my $Class = shift;
    my %opts = @_;
    my $self = \%opts;
    # validate %opts for correctness
    ...
    bless $self, $Class;
}

Then, all calling arguments to the constructor are passed as a hash, which makes the code much more readable than just a list of parameters.

Plus, like brian said, the @_ variable is unmodified, which can be useful in unusual cases.