How would I construct a capture literal that has both an invocant and at least one positional argument? How do I distinguish this from a capture literal that has no invocant and at least two positional arguments?
Gut instinct: if the first parameter in a list is delimited from the rest using a colon instead of a comma, treat it as the invocant; otherwise, treat it as the first positional argument. This would mean that the rules for capturing are as follows: * Capturing something in scalar context: If it is a pair, it is captured as a named argument; otherwise, it is captured as the invocant. * Capturing something in list context: Pairs are captured as named arguments; the first non-pair is captured as the invocant if it is followed by a colon, but as a positional argument otherwise; all other non-pairs are captured as positional arguments. So: $x = /$a; # $$x eqv $a $x = /:foo; # %$x eqv { foo => 1 } $x = /($a,); # @$x eqv ( $a ); is the comma neccessary, or are the () enough? $x = /($a:); # $$x eqv $a $x = /(:foo); # %$x eqv { foo => 1 }; assuming that adverbs can go inside (). $x = /($a, $b) # @$x eqv ($a, $b) $x = /($a: $b) # $$x eqv $a; @$x eqv ($b) $x = /:foo ($a: $b, $c):bar<baz> <== $d, $e <== flag => 0; # results on next three lines: # $$x eqv $a # @$x eqv ($b, $c, $d, $e) # %$x eqv { foo => 1, bar => 'baz', flag => 0 } Note that this approach makes it impossible for a pair to end up anywhere other than as a named argument in the capture object; while this makes sense when the capture object is being used as a proxy argument list, it makes less sense when it is being used as the equivalent of perl 5's references, and thus is probably a bug. -- Jonathan "Dataweaver" Lang