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)

Working with Variables and Built-in Data Types

Perl 6 is a language with gradual typing. This means that you are not required to indicate the type of the variables you create: you may freely use the same variable to store data of different types. However, you may also create a typed variable and, in that case, the compiler will check the usage of that variable and make sure that the variable is only used in the operations allowed for that type.

In this chapter, we will first go through the built-in types of Perl 6 and, later, learn how to work with variables:

  • Built-in data types
  • Type hierarchy
  • Variables
  • Scalars, arrays and hashes
  • Object-oriented properties of data types
  • Simple and composite data types