note Aristotle <p>I have to agree with the others &mdash; this
is far too convoluted and too seldomly useful to be a reasonable
idiom. If you must, I'd at least replace the
[perlfunc:shift|shift] with a simple <tt>$_&#91;0]</tt> so
what's going on is just a little more obvious. I still don't
like it one bit, though. If you don't have any positional
parameters, why are you passing an anonymous hash? If you don't,
it's easy to make the happenings blindingly obvious at the cost
of one extra line:</p> <code> sub foobar { my %arg = @_; my
($foo, $bar) = @arg{qw/ -foo -bar /}; # .. } </code> <p>Even if
you have positional parameters, an easy solution is to put them
at the beginning of the list so that you can say something
like</p> <code> my ($foo, $bar, %arg) = @_; my ($baz, $quux) =
@arg{qw(baz quux)}; </code> <p>The one case a hashref makes
sense is in case of a method called on a hash-based class.</p>
<p>But then your "idiom" means throwing away <code>$self</code>,
which I'd consider a bad idea. Even if the par