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)

Phasers

When creating a program in Perl 6, it is important to understand that controlling the program flow is a little trickier than simply following the instructions of the code. There are special types of code blocks that are automatically called by the compiler at different phases of the compilation and the execution processes. Those blocks are called phasers.

We mentioned two of them, BEGIN and CHECK, in Chapter 1, What is Perl 6?, when we talked about the -c command-line option of the compiler. Now, let's take a look at the rest.

Syntactically, phasers are blocks of code in curly braces preceded by a phaser name. The following table summarizes the different phasers that exist in Perl 6. Some of the phasers are executed at compile-time before the rest of the program is compiled and executed. Some are called at runtime.

Phaser name Execution stage Actions
BEGIN compile...