First, this is a mighty fine idea. It reduces the cost of certain common operations, even if hand-coding them is already inexpensive. More importantly, it solidifies common idioms behind descriptive names that the community can incorporate into its collective vocabulary.

Second, the all-caps are a bit much. (They burn my eyes.)

Third, I like the pre-loading refinement. (Personally, I wouldn't use them like this:

    my $min = MIN(1..10)->();
[download]

because I find this more pleasing:

    my $min = MIN->(1..10);
[download]

)

But the refinement does have value for finding min-maxes and max-mins:

    my $max_of_at_least_zero = MAX(0);
    $max_of_at_least_zero->($_) while <>;
    # ...
[download]

Fourth, let's load the tool-box up! How about some new additions?

• read_all – slurp filehandle
• read_all_from_path – open, slurp, close
• zip – merge parallel arrays
• zip_with – merge parallel arrays with a given "zipper" function
• foldl, foldl1, foldr, foldr1, scanl, scanl1, scanr, scanr1 – more friends from functional programming
• curry – everybody loves curry

Thanks for getting the ball rolling.

Cheers,
Tom

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