I know that it is probably (a few years) too late for a proposal like this, that is highly "invasive" wrt Perl's semantic, but here it is anyway...
Cmd line switches are so useful and effective to quickly change the behaviour of programs: IIRC tcl's syntax was inspired by them. But OTOH it is too strict in this sense (again IIRC) and Perl's one is much nicer IMHO (why else should I be programming in Perl?!?) however I wonder if in Perl6 cmd line like switches could be introduced for functions and operators in a way not conflicting with "current" semantics and yielding yet MWTDI. A wild guess suggests me that Perl6's ordered pairs may be a powerful/promising resource in this sense. Specifically I'd like to have the possibility of doing something like this: rename -v => 1, $orig, $new; and this should provide a nice default '--verbose' message a la: print "`$orig' => `$new'\n"; of course users should be allowed to fine tune the behaviour e.g. by means of something like (please excuse any explicit ignorance of actual Perl6 proposed syntax): rename.SWITCHES{-v} = sub { my ($o, $n) = @_; print "renaming `$o' to `$n'\n"; } Michele -- +++ wrote: > Idiot. top-poster - Robin Chapman in sci.math, "Re: This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics (Week 204)"