So it appears there must have been a very good reason found when Perl5 was produced?

I didn't think of major releases when I wrote that. If you sacrifice backwards compatibility anyway, (and I believe that the introduction of perl 5 did, but I'm too young to have been hacking at that time), any valid reason is good enough IMHO.

Also, the claim that documented behavior of local($foo)= $foo; and my $bar= $bar; requires the "current" order of evalatution is quite bogus. Indeed, that behavior for local didn't change between Perl4 and Perl5 but the order of evaluation did, QED.
Indeed, in these cases it's not really the order of evaluation that matters, but the scope. The scope of a my variable starts at the end of the statement in which it is declared, which you can easily test like this: 
$ perl -Mstrict -e 'my $x = $x'
Global symbol "$x" requires explicit package name at -e line 1.

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Now, if Perl6 makes the mistake (IMHO) of allowing context (of the RHS of an assignment statement) to be ambiguous at compile time

In Perl 6 it is known at parse time if an assignment is in list context of item context, if that is what you mean. And it has to be, because the list assignment infix:<=> has a different precedence than the item assignment infix:<=> operator, which allows for the magic of my @x = 1, 2, 3; and $x = 1, $y = 2 both to do what you mean.

In reply to Re^3: Will "$_[0]=shift" always resolve shift first? (irony) by moritz
in thread Will "$_[0]=shift" always resolve shift first? by kyle

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