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)

Creating a class

In Perl 6, classes are an integral part of the language design. To create a class, use the class keyword. The body of the class, containing its definition, is placed between a pair of curly braces.

Let us start creating a program that uses classes. We'll start with an empty class for a house:

class House {
}

It can be a good practice to begin class names with capital letters. This also agrees with the convention used in Perl 6 itself. Its types are called in the same manner, compare

Int, Str, Array, and so on.

The preceding code declares a class House and defines its body. Currently, the body is empty, but already you can use this definition to create instances of that class (or, using other terms, create objects of that type).

To some extent, the terms class and type are interchangeable. For example, you can treat strings as instances of the Str class...