This topic comes up from time to time on p5p. The short answer is that while theoretically it makes sense from some sort of orthogonal point of view, the parser code is not particularly amenable in this respect. From memory it's got something to do with disambiguating curlies (is this a hash deref or a code block coming up).

That is exactly what I had in mind: orthogonality and consistency. (Well, Perl 5 already deviates from them whenever convenient, and in very useful ways, so I'm not going mad about them either, but... well... you know...) And that's what I expected too: parsing difficulties.

That said, you can inline a subref lookup, if you are brave and insist on this approach.

Thank you for the suggestion. It is exactly the kind of trick I insistently thought that ought to exist:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;

(bless {}, 'Foo')->${\sub { print Dumper \@_ }}(1,2,3);

__END__
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Which is strange, because I made some tests and I was quite sure to have tried something along these lines too. Probably there were some spurious error that made me infer the wrong conclusion.

But you have to admit that the traditional approach is a little easier for people to comprehend.

Oh, for that... seconded all the way!