please, could you give me a link explaining this magical unification? My fantasy fails to imagine lexicals as package-vars ... or what exactly do you mean with "lexical variables as package variables" ???

I personally believe that I may well be the least entitled person to give you any further piece of information. (For any incorrect, imprecise, misleading claim in this post I hope to stand corrected ASAP by the intervention of someone who's more knowledgeable than I am!) For one thing however, packages in Perl 6 are different beasts wrt to their Perl 5 equivalents: for example, typeglobs are gone forever... but IIRC there are more sound and relevant (for the sake of the issue we're discussing here) differences as well. I seem to remember having read, at some point, that lexical variables are nothing but package variables of a magic ::MY package corresponding to the current lexical block. Of course, if all this has not changed, it must be somewhere within Perl 6's docs.

OTOH I also wonder how all this can mix with the fact that we can have lexically scoped packages too! (Declared with my, of course.) Again, if it's still true, then I would like both to see it backported to Perl 5, albeit, as I said, possibly only in terms of UI (well, if some more power could be given en passant that would be not so bad, don't you think so?) and to see how much of it can be backported there, from a consistency and orthogonality POV... (I'm the kind of guy interested in the "phylosophical POV" if it were not clear enough!)