Will @_ then act as the default array in Perl 6? I wasn't sure about this, given how references have thus far been described.

Could the default behavior possibly be dealt with like the following? (assuming I'm remembering correctly that @_ is still going to be the default argument array for subrutines whse arguments haven't been otherwise specified)

sub foo {
   my $bar = .shift // "some default";
   my $baz = .pop   // "some other default";
}
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I wonder why @_ in subs would still be needed. IIRC, you can write:

sub foo ($bar //= "some default", $bar //= "blah") {
    ...
}
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Oh I agree, but it seems the issue here is Perl 5 backwards compatibility.

Ah. That one's easy. Consider the following snippet of Perl 5 code:

sub foo {
  my $bar = shift;
  my %baz = @_;
  ...
}
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If you get rid of @_ and the defaulting behaviour of shift/pop et al how do you do a programmatic conversion to Perl 6?

Of course, once you've got it autoconverted to perl 6 you'd go through and change it to

sub foo($bar, %baz) {
  ...
}
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But having running code which you can test is important.