Paint me daft, then, I do it all the time in tests. :)

Perhaps any extra arguments to can() could be bound to the subref returned. It's a nice idea; it just seems really hard to get super-scary magic right. Here's some untested code that seems somewhat useful:

use Scalar::Util 'blessed';

sub curried_can
{
    my ($thingie, $func) = splice( @_, 0, 2 );
    my $sub = UNIVERSAL::can( $thingie, $func );

    # $thingie cannot $func
    return unless $sub;

    # first argument is an object
    return sub { $thingie->$func( @_ ) } if blessed $thingie;
    
    # first argument is a class name, no arguments
    return $sub unless @_;

    # first argument is a class name, curried arguments
    return sub { $sub->( @_ ) };
}
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