def add(x, y):
return x + y
e: Just clarifying that your complaint here is that every sub in Perl 5 just receives a list of its arguments; this isn't a "more than one way to do it" issue.
The old P5 motto TIMTOWTDI was long ago updated to TIMTOWTDIBSCINABTE and P6 adopts the latter. While P6 supports most of the options shown for P5, most folk writing P6 will just write something like:
sub add($x, $y) { $x + $y }How much actual cognitive overhead is there associated with three of four different ways of unpacking args?
Speaking for myself (as a long-time Perl/Python/GoLang/etc programmer), when I jump into a language I don't know, it doesn't take me long to get 'muscle memory' for how such things work.
It doesn't matter which way you unpack your args unless you are trying to do something fancy (the sub 1% cases). Just pick one.
Hell, it's easy enough to make a script to rewrite multiple shifts into destructured list assignment or vice versa.