Perl 6 Deep Dive

Collecting data with gather and take

Preparing data lists can be very expressively organized with a pair of keywords in Perl 6—gather and take. The easiest way to understand how that works is by taking a look at the following example:

my @data = gather {    take 'a';    take 'b';}say @data;

The block of code after the gather keyword returns a sequence that is saved in the @data array. The elements of the sequence are provided by the take keywords. So, there will be two elements in @data, as you can see here:

[a b]

Let's consider a bigger example. It contains a two-dimensional matrix of integer numbers and a list of instructions. The instructions are the four directions—left, right, up, and down, and a command— take-it. You should start at the ...