Book Image

Perl 6 Deep Dive

By : Andrew Shitov
Book Image

Perl 6 Deep Dive

By: Andrew Shitov

Overview of this book

Perl is a family of high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming languages consisting of Perl 5 and Perl 6. Perl 6 helps developers write concise and declarative code that is easy to maintain. This book is an end-to-end guide that will help non-Perl developers get to grips with the language and use it to solve real-world problems. Beginning with a brief introduction to Perl 6, the first module in the book will teach you how to write and execute basic programs. The second module delves into language constructs, where you will learn about the built-in data types, variables, operators, modules, subroutines, and so on available in Perl 6. Here the book also delves deeply into data manipulation (for example, strings and text files) and you will learn how to create safe and correct Perl 6 modules. You will learn to create software in Perl by following the Object Oriented Paradigm. The final module explains in detail the incredible concurrency support provided by Perl 6. Here you will also learn about regexes, functional programming, and reactive programming in Perl 6. By the end of the book, with the help of a number of examples that you can follow and immediately run, modify, and use in practice, you will be fully conversant with the benefits of Perl 6.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Using recursion

Our next program in this chapter is a simple loop that prints the numbers from 10 to 15 and calculates their sum. Let us first print in numbers. As we've seen in Chapter 5, Control Flow, there are different ways of making a loop in Perl 6. Choosing between them can lead us already in the direction of functional programming.

The loop cycle needs a loop counter:

my $sum = 0;
loop (my $n = 10; $n <= 15; $n++) {
$sum += $n;
}
say $sum; # 75

There are two variables that change their values in this program—$n and $sum. It is very easy to get rid of the $n counter, and thus re-assigning it a value:

my $sum = 0;
for 10..15 {
$sum += $_;
}
say $sum;

Now, we are using the $_ variable instead of $n and actually the for loop can use an explicit loop variable:

my $sum = 0;
for 10..15 -> $n {
$sum += $n;
}
say $sum;

The difference between this code and the...