Well I liked the reply from moritz, it was a bit of fun and that's good (I gave him a ribbing on a /msg though).
Back to the question. Correct me if I'm wrong (I know you will), but isn't the Perl 6 solution using references as well? To quote Apocalyse 6: "All positional parameters regardless of their type are considered scalars, and imply scalar context for the actual arguments. If you pass an array or hash to such a parameter, it will actually pass a reference to the array or hash, just as if you'd backslashed the actual argument.
So Perl 6 still passes references, its just that the syntax no longer requires the \.