The original design of @+ and @- was a complete botch, and 5.10 extends that botch to the use of hashes. Perl 5 should move toward the Perl 6 model of a single lexical variable containing all the information from the last match, and then any variables like $1 are just aliases into that structure. Parallel global arrays and hashes are madness, even if I could keep straight which one is the beginning and which one is the end, which I can't. And parallel hashes force you to do the hash lookup twice. Madness...