Very cool, thanks for the heads up. I guess I know what I'm going to be doing tonight :-)

update: Ack!...

    class Dog is Mammal;
    has Limb @.paws;
    method walk () { .paws».move() }
[download]

Umm, I have some questions here...

1. What on earth is that character? A "right-pointing double angle quotation mark", eh? Wow, that's a mouthful... and here I was thinking weird non-ASCII quotation marks were a Microsoft Word foible.
2. How do we pronounce it? update: still looking for an answer to this question
3. Why is there a character in the basic syntax of the core language that can't be typed on a standard-issue us-ascii keyboard? What am I missing here?
4. How are we supposed to type it? Can we just type >> and have it work, or are we going to have to find a way to insert that character? (I know, in Emacs I can bind a key combination to it, but what about posting code on web fora, usenet, and so forth?)update: A12 does answer this, just not until page 19.
5. How are we supposed to do stuff with code containing this character, such as copy and paste it between applications, store it in files, and so on?. Oddly, this stuff seems to work for me using Emacs 21 on Mandrake 9.2, even storing on a FAT32 filesystem. I'm still a little concerned about cross-platform support for this, though.
6. Am I overreacting? Can someone reassure me about this and explain how it's okay? I guess it's not _so_ bad, considering we can just type >>

The only keyboard I've seen where I can type the non-ASCII character in question is the DEC keyboard used with the VT510, which has a Compose key. On that keyboard, I can construct the character by typing compose then > then > -- but that's three strokes, which makes it at least as bad as a trigraph operator, and in any case the VMS system in question doesn't have Perl installed (or much else). I can use copy and paste from A12 into Emacs and thus bind a key to insert the character when I'm working in Emacs, but I won't be able to easily use it in other situations, e.g., when I'm discussing it on Perlmonks using Mozilla. This is ultimately a minor annoyance, since parallel dispatch isn't something I anticipate using very often (update umm, but some of the other uses are more important), but nevertheless I reserve the right to not like it. IfSince it turns out that >> will work, I'll be much happier doing it that way.

On a side note, Page 19 says...

But there is, of course, a hyper version [of the identity operator]: @a »=:=« @b

Yeesh. Typed on a standard keyboard, that's a heptagraph operator. Wow. I thought the Perl-is-line-noise people were annoying NOW. Wait till they get a load of this!