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 Unicode

The default assumption is that the source of a Perl 6 program uses UTF-8. It gives you the power of the whole spectrum of characters without worrying if it will work. In Perl 5, for example, you had to add special instructions in order to inform the interpreter that you are using non-ASCII characters in the source code. In Perl 6, this is much easier.

First, Unicode characters may be freely used in strings. For example, let's try some Greek and Chinese graphemes, as shown in the following lines of code:

say 'C = 2πr';       # Circumference of a circle
say         # 'Sun' and 'Moon' give 'bright'

The preceding two lines of code will print the corresponding strings as expected:

C = 2πr 

Alternatively, it is possible to refer to the Unicode codepoints by their names. For example, consider the following line of...