Sometimes things seem to click and fall into place inside my brain. Previously unrelated concepts turn out to be have commonalities after all.

For example, I said yesterday on #perl6 that I'd realized, teaching Perl 5, that taking away wantarray was only a logical next step after taking away sigil variance. Moritz was way ahead of me, though: he had blogged about exactly this a year ago.

But a much deeper insight hit me on the Sunday, when jnthn++ was talking, and explaining how Captures and Signatures form two sides of a function call binding:

 caller                     callee

Capture <---> binder <---> Signature

and then showing a slide that looked like this:

my ($some, $random, $things) := some-function();

The point of the slide is that Signatures aren't just used in function declarations; they're used in the above case as well. I've always thought that this was a random, fortuitous bonus use of it...

...but then Liz turned to me and whispered "that's because return is just another function call". And right then and there, I went through some sort of mini-enlightenment. How beautiful!

Later, Liz divulged that this was the kind of insight that came naturally when one had programmed in continuation-passing style for a while. It'd be interesting to learn whether CPS is the reason for Signatures being used in bindings like this in Perl 6. For some reason, my guess is no.

Anyway, Perl 6 surprising me with its consistency is only appropriate, given the name of this blog.