I've just realised I quoted the wrong doc earlier, I meant to link to: http://dev.perl.org/perl6/doc/design/syn/S12.html#Methods
.doit () # ILLEGAL (two terms in a row) .doit .() # okay, no arguments, same as .doit() I had wrongly thought this also applied to subroutine calls, and that the OP's open ('file.txt'); was illegal. I stand corrected! Cheers, Carl