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)

Threads

In Perl 6, there is the Thread class, which takes care of creating and running threads. To see in which thread you are at the moment, use the $*THREAD pseudo constant:

say $*THREAD;

It returns a value of the Thread class, and the default stringified representation of it is a string containing the identifier and the name of the thread:

Thread #1 (Initial thread)

Don't rely on the particular value of the thread identifier as it may be different even for the main thread.

Starting a thread

In this and in the following sections, we will examine the methods of the Thread class. We will start, though, with the start method, which creates a thread and starts its execution.

In the following example, three threads are created...