"jarring". That one word pretty much summed up my rambling. Thanks!

Well, there's jarring, and then there's jarring. There's a qualitative difference between driving into a brick wall vs. driving over those same thousand bricks scattered over the road. We're aiming more for the latter effect. That's just one of the reasons we're not renaming Perl to something else, because that would make the transition look more like a brick wall. Another reason is that we don't want to waste a perfectly good four-letter word that googles well and has even been installed in the OED. A third reason is that we're not actually changing the most fundamental aspect of Perl, which is its basis in how natural languages work. If anything, we're just reinterpreting what that means to make it more true of Perl.

But yes, we expect the migration process to be a little jarring in spots. We'll do what we can to keep the bricks spread out.

Here's one monk who can't wait to be jarred by Perl 6. If you see Larry, pass on my thanks for taking the time to answer questions on perlmonks.org! ;-)

[Jon]

    I'm not saying that perl6 in general (or making parens optional in
+ specific) is a bad idea.
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if my ($i) = / ^ (f+) / {
    # Do stuff
}

say $i;  # $i still defined.
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The scoping rules are much simpler now. And because blocks are closures, you can pass parameters to them, which are scoped to the block. So you could write your statement like this:

    if /^ (f+) / -> *$i {
        # Do stuff
    }
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where the * on the parameter list treats the pattern match result as binding to a list value, so the search result acts like a list value and binds $1 to $i. And arguably it's more readable because it puts the first thing that happens, the pattern match, out front. The parameter binding only happens if the pattern match succeeds.

Or look at it another way. Suppose you run into a new control construct:

    frob my $x = bar() {...}
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Tell me quick whether $x is local to that block? In the Perl 5 world, you don't know for sure, because the scoping rules are arbitrary, and change between builtins and user-defined control verbs. In the Perl 6 world you know it isn't local, because the my isn't inside the block. Period. On the other hand, if you see

    frob bar() -> $x {...}
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then you absolutely know that $x is local because it's explicitly being passed as a parameter.

I think people who initially perceive this as Bad or Ugly will eventually come around to seeing it as Kinda Pretty.