It's funny - lots of people have this reaction to the paren-lessness of Perl 6. "Yuck! I'd never leave them out!" Often with a rationale of some sort.

A few weeks pass. The person gets comfortable with Perl 6. The scales come off; the parentheses go away.

I've written a fair bit of Perl 6 code for 18 months now. I find the lack of parentheses easier to read and less cluttered than putting them in. After for, if, while et al., they simply don't have a purpose. They don't mean anything. The only reason other languages have them there is that they have things like braceless forms of those keywords, or that they cargo-cult C.

The only reason other languages have them there is that they have things like braceless forms of those keywords, or that they cargo-cult C.

Another valid reason is to prevent parsing ambiguities when the braces are optional, as in C. Making both parens and braces in an if statement optional feels like exaggerated liberty :-)

Perl 6 - links to (nearly) everything that is Perl 6.

It just looks better with them

Can't agree with that, but taste is a personal matter.

IMnsHO omiting the parents is just as clever as omiting the curlies in if statements in C or JavaScript. Something you can do, but sooner or even sooner it'll bite you.

I can easily see the failure mode with omitting curlies in C or JS, but I don't see what could go wrong with ommiting the parens around the if condition. Care to elaborate?

The only thing that might become confusing is when you use a map or grep with a block without additional parens. But that's only a rather rare case, and IMansHO not good reason to include visual noise in the general case.

(I might also add that I've written a fair bit of Perl 6 code already and haven't been bitten by that)