Perl 6 Essentials

Basics

IMCC’s main purpose is assembling PASM or PIR source files. It can run them immediately or generate a Parrot bytecode file for running later.

Internally, IMCC works a little differently with PASM and PIR source code, so each has different restrictions. The default is to run in a “mixed” mode that allows PASM code to mix with the higher-level syntax unique to PIR.

A file with a .pasm extension is treated as pure PASM code, as is any file run with the -a command-line option. These files can use macros,^[45] but none of PIR’s syntax. This mode is mainly used for running pure PASM tests that were originally written for assemble.pl.

The documentation that comes with IMCC in languages/imcc/docs/ and the test suite in languages/imcc/t are good starting points for digging deeper into its syntax and functionality.

Statements

The syntax of statements in PIR is much more flexible than PASM. All PASM opcodes are valid PIR code, so the basic syntax is still an opcode followed by its arguments:

print "He's pining for the fjords.\n"

The statement delimiter is a newline \n, just like PASM, so each statement has to be on its own line. Any statement can start with a label.

LABEL: print I1

But unlike PASM, PIR has some higher-level constructs, including symbol operators:

I1 = 5

named variables:

count = 5

and complex statements built from multiple keywords and symbol operators:

if I1 <= 5 goto LABEL

We’ll get into these in more detail as we go.

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