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 simple built-in data types

Perl 6 comes with a number of various built-in types that cover the common range of things, such as Booleans, integers, and strings, but also offers unusual data types. We will cover them in this section. To demonstrate the built-in types, we will print them to the console using the say function, as we did in the ‘Hello, World!’ example.

The hierarchy is built using two types of items: roles and classes. Roles are drawn in ovals, while classes are rectangle boxes. Roles are similar to interfaces in some programming languages. In this chapter, we won't focus on the details of what is a role or a class. You can learn that in detail in Chapter 8, Object-Oriented Programming. For now, we will assume that you have some basic understanding of object-oriented programming and will be able to understand the hierarchy of the data types...