Perl 6 Deep Dive

Working with Variables and Built-in Data Types

Perl 6 is a language with gradual typing. This means that you are not required to indicate the type of the variables you create: you may freely use the same variable to store data of different types. However, you may also create a typed variable and, in that case, the compiler will check the usage of that variable and make sure that the variable is only used in the operations allowed for that type.

In this chapter, we will first go through the built-in types of Perl 6 and, later, learn how to work with variables:

• Built-in data types
• Type hierarchy
• Variables
• Scalars, arrays and hashes
• Object-oriented properties of data types
• Simple and composite data types