I thought it's always a private accessor. The MOP knows how to really get at that slot, though this may be inlined and optimized down, it's logically an accessor submethod. $!salary will do something different in a P6opaque than in a P5hash or a dotNetImport etc.

So how does the compiler communicate with the meta-object protocol to ask "how do I generate code to access this slot?" if it's not a function provided by the MOP?

Given the normal public access semantics, "$.foo, @.foo, %.foo, &.foo are just shorthands of self.foo with different contexts" and "$.foo(1,2,3); # calls self.foo under $ context", the sigil of the attribute doesn't show up when accessing it, so you can't have attributes with the same base name but different sigils.

Is the same thing true with $!foo, @!foo, etc? After all,
"$!think($pinky) # short for $(self!think($pinky))"
and I can't imagine the grammar doing things differently depending on whether the token after it was declared as a method or an attribute. I don't see the ! becoming twigil-like for attribute names, right?

So, does $!foo appear to have a similar nature to $!bar (one of those is an attribute and the other is a submethod; which is which?) with respect to @!foo etc meaning the same slot in a different context? Or does it appear to be similar to a local variable, with the sigil and twigil being part of the name and @!foo being a different location?

—John

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