Oops, part of Diamian's quoted text got trimmed accidentally in my last
post.  It should have looked like this:

On 6/17/05 10:42 PM, John Siracusa wrote:
>  [...] I'm not, however,  buying Damian's argument here:
>  
>  On 2005-05-15 20:33:19, damian@[...].org (Damian Conway) said:
> > This missing design rationale here is that the colon acts as part of the
> > unary
> > operator:
> > 
> >      ./    unary public-method-call-on-invocant
> >      .:    unary private-method-call-on-invocant
> >
> > So the rule is:
> > 
> >      One-character operator --> call on $_
> >      Two-character operator --> call on $?SELF"
> 
>  It strikes me as more of a "rationalization" than a "rationale"--picking out
>  patterns after the fact, because that's what our brains like to do. [...]

-John