...Perl subroutines don't have a lot of historical cruft to get rid of. In fact, the basic problem with Perl 5's subroutines is that they're not crufty enough, so the cruft leaks out into user-defined code instead, by the Conservation of Cruft Principle. Perl 6 will let you migrate the cruft out of the user-defined code and back into the declarations where it belongs. Then you will think it to be very beautiful cruft indeed (we hope).