Joseph, you've got yourself into a trap I fell into yesterday. %stash.append( :@stuff ) syntax is about calling append method with a named parameter stuff whereas append works with positionals only. So, your case should be written:
%stash.append( (:@stuff) ); Which is apparently more cumbersome. In either case, use of colons is not always about saving a character or two. Sometimes it's about readability, sometimes about elegance. Overuse is surely bad, but overuse of anything is bad, for that matter. :) Best regards, Vadim Belman > On Mar 17, 2020, at 1:09 PM, Joseph Brenner <doom...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> Though I've no idea what those colons are/are not doing. > > Those are "colon pairs" (which I've relearned around three times now...): > > https://docs.raku.org/language/glossary#index-entry-Colon_Pair > <https://docs.raku.org/language/glossary#index-entry-Colon_Pair> > > Except for this colon: > > %stash.append: (rocks => @rocks); > > Which is a short hand for this: > > %stash.append( (rocks => @rocks) ); > > As an aside: it's a minor style point, but I think a lot of > us overuse that trick-- it saves a character, but the explicit > parens are more flexible. > > Notably this works fine, so here it doesn't even save any > characters: > > %stash.append( :@stuff ); > >
