It's not just one argument! I't consumes as many arguments as you like, there is also the HYPER WHATEVER which is two asterisc in a row * * (without white space

It's not just one argument! I't consumes as many arguments as you like, there is also the HYPER WHATEVER which is two asterisc in a row * * (without white space a limitation of HN!) which is a dimensioned form of whatever for dealing with higher dimension data structures. The following are identical with and without whatever: perl6> "ACAGATAAATTA".comb.map: * ~ * ~ * ; ACA GAT AAA TTA perl6> "ACAGATAAATTA".comb.map({$^first ~ $^second ~ $^third}); ACA GAT AAA TTA It's worth pointing out we're lucky that 'first' is lexically before 'second' in the second one though. The $^ consumes parameters in the lexical order of the variable names. So it's used normally for $^a $^b in sorting. So .sort({$^a cmp $^b}) versus .sort({$^b cmp $^a}). But a general feature was made rather than an obscure exception. In general Perl6 is very consistent. It might also just be a bit too crazy at times, some of the stuff you can do like the (* * *)(2,3) below you obviously would just not do in real life. So an example where the lexical ordering is kind of neat: perl6> "ACAGATAAATTA".comb.map({$^third ~ $^second ~ $^first}); ACA TAG AAA ATT Contrived since you could just split the string by three characters and flip it :P But hopefully you get the idea!