Perl 6 and Parrot Essentials, Second Edition

Chapter 4. Basic Syntax

Perl 6 is a work in progress, so the syntax is rapidly changing. The next four chapters are likely to be outdated by the time you read them. Even so, they provide a good baseline. If you start here, you’ll only have to catch up on a few months of changes (starting with the design documents after Apocalypse 12), instead of several years worth.

Pretend for a moment that you don’t know anything about Perl. You heard the language has some neat features, so you thought you might check it out. You go to the store and pick up a copy of Programming Perl because you think this Larry Wall guy might know something about it. It’s the latest version, put out for the 6.0.1 release of Perl. It’s not a delta document describing the changes, it’s an introduction, and you dive in with the curiosity of a kid who got a telescope for his birthday. These chapters are a glimpse down that telescope.

There’s plenty of time later to analyze each feature and decide which you like and which you don’t. For now, take a step back and get a feel for the system as a whole, for what it’ll be like to work in it.

Variables

The most basic building blocks of a programming language are its nouns, the chunks of data that get sucked in, pushed around, altered in various ways, and spat out to some new location. The chunks of data are values: strings, numbers, etc., or composites of the simpler values. Variables are just named containers for those values. The three kinds of variables in Perl 6 are scalars, ...