Why then should we actively discourage authors of AUTOLOADs who want to try to match future behaviour, now? Offering people no way to smooth the transition between how their code acts now and how it will act in some future release seems like a pretty serious omission to me.

Furthermore it means that adding an AUTOLOAD can introduce many unintended effects that you have no way around. (Which is probably one reason why inherited AUTOLOADs for functions is now deprecated.)

My attitude is this. A normal method has no way of knowing what package you tried to call it in. However an AUTOLOAD method has that information in $AUTOLOAD. Why? Because details of how you dispatched to AUTOLOAD can very reasonably affect what that AUTOLOAD should do. While I agree that a normal function or method should not guess, in an AUTOLOAD you may want that information for similar reasons.

There's a lot of code out there that presumes that nothing can detect the difference between method and subroutine calls. This is deliberate, and is thus a feature, not a bug.

So, there'll be ways to "fake" a method call using a subroutine call, like we have now? There'll have to be, or else you can't get Perl5 semantics inside Perl6 syntax, as promised.

For example, this should still work, somehow:

my $meth = $object->can("foo");
$meth->($object, $arg1, $arg2); # simulate $object->foo($arg1, $arg2);
[download]

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
Be sure to read my standard disclaimer if this is a reply.

Yes, once you've taken a reference to a method, it's essentially a sub ref at that point, so the Perl 6 equivalent of your code works as you'd expect. In fact, the standard dispatchers are defined in those terms. But the standard dispatchers will be able to keep subs and methods straight to the extent that you wish them to (which, by default, is up to the point that a method turns out to be completely missing, and you wish it to "failover" to looking for a multi-sub instead).

Even today, in Perl5, I'd write that as

$object->$meth($arg1,$arg2);
[download]

but it's clear that one or the other should be there, and not something ugly like

apply($object,$method,$arg1,$arg2);
[download]

or, assuming that can returned a bound method,

my $meth_ref = $object->can($method);
apply($meth_ref,$arg1,$arg2);
[download]