Oh, believe me, constructs in Perl (both Perl 5 and Perl 6) mean different things depending on context, too. :) As a simple example, which you'll find in vario

Oh, believe me, constructs in Perl (both Perl 5 and Perl 6) mean different things depending on context, too. :) As a simple example, which you'll find in various languages, not just Perl: brackets ('[ ]') construct list objects when standing alone, but when they occur after something, they do array indexing into that thing. This all falls out naturally, and humans are very well equipped at switching between this type of contexts. The Perl 5 behaviour of overloading 'reverse' with double meaning could be said to be context-dependent in this way. But the flip/reverse/invert distinction goes in the other direction, saying "hey, maybe we do want to keep these three concepts separate rather than crowding them all into the same method". A similar thing has happened with 'length'. In Perl 5, 'length' always meant 'number of characters in the supplied string', but newbies kept expecting the function to work for lists too. It doesn't. In Perl 6, there's a method '.elems' for lists and '.chars' for strings. Neither of them are accessible as 'length'. In a lot of places where Perl 5 overloads words and depends on context for the right semantics, Perl 6 strives to make things consistent and eliminate mental lists of things you have to remember.