Think Perl 6

Part II. Moving Forward

Now that you have reached the end of the first part of this book, you should no longer be a pure beginner. By now, you should be able to go through the official Perl 6 documentation and find your way.

There are many more things to say about programming. The next three chapters will be devoted to more advanced concepts and new programming paradigms, including:

Object-oriented programming

We will describe how we can construct our own types and methods, which is a way to extend the language.

Using grammars

This is a form of declarative programming in which you define axioms and rules and derive knowledge from these; grammars are a very powerful way to analyze textual content and are used to transform program source code into executable statements.

Functional programming

This is yet another programming paradigm in which computation is expressed as the evaluation of mathematical functions.

Each of these chapters probably deserves a full book in its own right (and might have one some day), but we hope to tell you enough about them to get you going. In my opinion, every programmer should know about these powerful concepts in order to be able to select the best way to solve a given problem.

Perl 6 is a multiparadigm language, so we can really cover these topics in terms of the Perl 6 language. A number of subjects that we have introduced in previous chapters should lead you easily into these new ideas, and this is the reason why I think it is possible to properly cover ...