As to the perl 6 stuff, BTW, there is a binding operator, :=, but it's nothing like =~; it binds one variable to be an alias of another. =~ is becomming the smart-match operator, ~~, which will do even more then =~, becomming polymorphic on both sides, doing things like array intersection.

In any case, pretty much all operators are overloadable in perl6. However, smart-match is probably smart enough to call the approprate string-/num-/bool-/etc-rafication overloads, as approprate.