I don't understand why this stuff is confusing; it's not new with Perl 6. There's a long tradition in O-O of distinguishing between the externally visible accessor and the internal storage - Ruby self.foo vs @foo, Java this.foo vs setFoo()/getFoo(), etc. In fact the Ruby case is directly analogous:
Perl 6 Ruby has $.foo attr_reader :foo has $.foo is rw attr_accessor :foo $.foo
