I did say corelist as you point out but was thinking perl should be able to dump data structures with a core function. But I know who's in charge so it's just my much-less informed opinion, from a purely practical standpoint of always having to add Data::Dumper when things go awry. If this was wrong they probably wouldn't have bundled dumping into Perl6. I have beaten File::Slurp to death (also core perl6 functionality afaik) and the only time it failed was write_file with 2GB of data (syswrite error). I just wish Perl5 had perfect versions of read_dir, read_file and write_file to expedite what's usually done with readdir, open and print.