The former is a variable; the latter is a function.
@_ is one of Perl's "pronoun" variables: just as $_ refers to "that" which you were most recently working with, @_ refers to "those" which you were most recently working with. $_ is a scalar -- "it" or "that"; a single thing. @_ is a list -- "those" or "these"; a plural thing.
shift is a function for pulling off the first element from a list.
Wrong! If you try to use shift() with a list it will print out a nice error message "Type of arg 1 to shift must be array".
perldoc -q "What is the difference between a list and an array"
John -- use Perl; program fulfillment
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