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 introspection to learn more

The Perl 6 object system has a built-in mechanism for introspection, with which you can see what this particular object in hand can do, which class it is implementing, which methods can be used, and so on.

In the previous chapters, we already used one of the mechanisms of introspection—the WHAT method. It returns the type object with information about the type of the object that is located in the container now. We are talking about introspection in the chapter dedicated to the object-oriented programming, but you should keep in mind that in Perl 6, many other simple variables such as strings or integers are also objects.

For example, this is how you can see the type of a string and an integer. The program prints the stringified version of what the WHAT method returns:

say 'string'.WHAT; # (Str)
say 42.WHAT; # (Int)

With...