Colon-pair details in REPL look buggy

[fecundf]

https://docs.perl6.org/type/Pair says "Colon pairs can be chained without a comma to create a List of Pairs. Depending on context you may have to be explicit when assigning colon lists." - and follows with examples, which led me to experiments, that raise more questions. I would think all 5 of these should say the same thing but instead give 3 different answers. Does the doc need an addition to describe this? Is it a problem with Rakudo Star 2018.10?

$ perl6
To exit type 'exit' or '^D'
> (:a1:b2:c3)
(a1 => True b2 => 1 c3 => 1)
> (:a1,:b2,:c3)
(a1 => True b2 => True c3 => True)
> :a1,:b2,:c3
(a1 => True b2 => True c3 => True)
> :a1:b2:c3
a1 => True
> :a1 :b2 :c3
a1 => True

[JJ]

Maybe this is an issue for perl6/doc and not roast? Should I transfer it?

[lizmat]

Yeah. Afaik, the colonpairs are currently working by design (with which I don't always agree, but that's another matter).

[cfa]

This behaviour appears to be unchanged since 2015.12:

15:27 | cfa         | bisectable6: my @a = :a1:b2:c3; say @a.elems
15:27 | bisectable6 | cfa, On both starting points (old=2015.12 new=f2ed3db) the exit code is 0 and the output is identical as well
15:27 | bisectable6 | cfa, Output on both points: «1␤»

FYI, documentation was added in this commit.

(CC @AlexDaniel, who mentioned an old RT ticket about this just now.)

[AlexDaniel]

• RT#131089 [open]: https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=131089 Different parsing of combined colonpairs
• RT#125353 [open]: https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=125353 [BUG] %(:a:b) ignores all elements after the first one
• RT#124553 [new]: https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=124553 Roast rakudo skip/todo test:./S03-operators/adverbial-modifiers.t line:170 reason: 'Multi colonpair syntax not yet understood'

[cfa]

Thanks.

[JJ]

Added this question in stackoverflow too