Fellow monks,

now that Perl6 is suddenly all around us, can someone explain to me the new . syntax for subroutine calls? I was under the impression that this is the replacement for Perl5's ->, making it more compatible with conventions in many other languages (such as Java), and being somewhat reserved for use in object-oriented programming.

But looking at the Perl6/Pugs quicksort example it seems to be okay to use it for normal function calls as well (as opposed to the current -> whose usage outside of OO is frowned upon). 

use v6;

multi sub quicksort ( ) { () }

multi sub quicksort ( *$x, *@xs ) {
    my @pre  = @xs.grep:{ $_ < $x };
    my @post = @xs.grep:{ $_ >= $x };
    (@pre.quicksort, $x, @post.quicksort);
}

(1, 5, 2, 4, 3).quicksort.say;

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Is there a reason why that last line is not written 
say quicksort (1, 5, 2, 4, 3);

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Please enlighten your brother in his confusion (and I have not even started to ponder about the many new ways to specify argument *$x, $@xs).

PS: Multi subs are cool.

In reply to Perl6 dot syntax (for methods?) by Thilosophy

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