[username223]

> I however don't understand the reason for naming of eg elsif, my, slurp/spurt??

Yes, it's for historical reasons. "elsif" is spelled that way in Perl 5. Perl 5 has both "my" and "local" to specify lexical and dynamic scoping, respectively, so Perl 6 using "local" for lexical scope would be confusing. "slurp" is a common term for reading the entire contents of a file at once.

[omaranto]

"my" is shorter than "local" or "let" and fairly evocative. Maybe you should ask why other languages don't use "my", instead. :P

[cafard]

"my" arrived after "local". The former is true lexical scoping, the latter isn't quite.

[tbrownaw]

Right. As gp says, "local" is dynamic scoping.

It's available as long as the declaration stays on the call stack. It more-or-less allows globals to be temporarily redefined.

[DonHopkins]

Think locally, act globally.