Under my current design of containers (see "definition of containers" on p6c), there are only Scalar, Array and Hash containers. This is in accordance to them being the only first-class data structures that deals with mutable data storage.
This is similar to JVM's division between scalar data and collection data; it's just Perl 6 introduces two collections with differnet interfaces. With the elimination of the * sigil and the *{} dereferencer, the only unresolved sigil type is &. Unlike collections, it is really difficult to tell the difference between $code and &{$code}. Moreover, it makes little sense to say: tie(&code, TiedCode); Since it is much easier to just wrap the &code in place. All this led us to think about whether (my &foo) can be merely treated the same as (my Code $foo). The mutable form will enable convenient notations such as: &foo = sub { ... }; So instead of having to explain to newcomers that you cannot assign to a &-sigil symbol, it would all just work. Under this view, &{$x} would be eliminated with *{}. Another idea is to treat (my &foo) the same way (my Code $foo is constant). That will discourage people into assigning into functions, and enable the compiler to detect function variables at lvalue position as errors, but on the whole I don't think it's worth the complexity. Does this make sense? Thanks, /Autrijus/
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