Perl 6 Deep Dive

Operators as functions

Operators perform some actions over their arguments. Operator's arguments are called operands. In the preceding example, the + operator takes two operands, $a and $b. The = operator also takes two operands—on the left side of it, it expects the variable, to which it will assign the value of the operand on the right side.

In any programming language, operators are simply a handy syntactical solution to have more expressive programs and can be replaced with calling a function. For example, in the preceding example, you write $c = $a + $b, but you can also do the same by calling the add function that we saw in Chapter 1, What is Perl 6?. Let's rewrite the previous example:

my $a = 10;my $b = 20;my $c = 0;$c = add($a, $b); ...