because of the ambiguity of literal hashes and blocks, the parser can't tell what you mean between curlies w/o heuristics. For instance from time to time people are very confused why map doesn't work like they thought.

That's why Perl6 introduces < > for hashes.

You either need to ...

• put a do in front of your { block },

• or use a comma as statement separator.

   open(F, "<$somefile") || print("Could not open file\n"), exit 3;

But keep in mind, the if() solution you showed is the most readable for most programmers.

> Does anyone have a link to a discussion of why this is?

e.g. Re: map problem or Re: map syntax error -- weird