You call a sub which is declared as accepting an integer arg - so perl pushes an int value dircectly onto the stack rather than the usual pointer to SV. But if someone in the meantime has redefined foo() to be a sub accepting a normal SV argument, then perl won't just do the wrong thing - it will likely crash with a SEGV, or even be a security hole, when it tries to interpret that integer value as the address of an SV.

Dave.