=head1 TITLE
Run Perl 6 Today!
=head1 BLURB
For a while, you could have thought Perl 6 was vaporware. It isn't. You
can install Pugs and run Perl 6 programs in five minutes.
(This isn't a module; It's an article to appear in the December 2005
issue of I<The Perl Review>.)
=head1 BODY
Perl 6 is an incredibly fun language to play with. It isn't finished
yet, and in fact for a while it looked like it would take forever to
arrive. But thanks to the Pugs project, you can try it out right now
and start hacking Perl 6 straight away.
=head2 First things first
[[ This section could be placed in a sidebar. If so, the previous
paragraph should point to it. ]]
If you're on *nix, one of these commands should get you up to speed:
apt-get install pugs pugs-doc # Debian
pkg_add pugs # FreeBSD
emerge pugs # Gentoo
On Windows, you can fetch the PxPerl binary distribution from this site:
http://www.pxperl.com/?pxperl
If your OS isn't one of the above, or if you want to build Pugs yourself,
you'll need the latest GHC compiler from L<http://haskell.org/ghc/>,
and then install L<Perl6::Pugs> via CPAN, like a standard Perl 5
module. Compiling Pugs takes a lot of memory, so try this on a strong
machine.
=head2 What's in the box?
You get B<pugs>, the experimental compiler for Perl 6. Along with it come
plenty of short example programs, some modules, and documentation. B<pugs>
can run programs from files and via the B<-e> switch, just like B<perl>,
but it also has an interactive mode which is great for quick things. In
Perl 5, you'd probably run C<perl -de 42> for this; here, just run it with
no parameters. You'll get a welcome banner and a prompt.
[[ The screenshot is optional :-) ]]
$ pugs
______
/\ __ \
\ \ \/\ \ __ __ ______ ______ (P)erl6
\ \ __//\ \/\ \/\ __ \/\ ___\ (U)ser's
\ \ \/ \ \ \_\ \ \ \/\ \ \___ \ (G)olfing
\ \__\ \ \____/\ \____ \/\_____\ (S)ystem
\/__/ \/___/ \/___/\ \/____/
/\____/ Version: 6.2.10
\/___/ Copyright 2005 by Audrey Tang
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Web: http://pugscode.org/ Email: perl6-compiler@perl.org
Welcome to Pugs -- Perl6 User's Golfing System
Type :h for help.
Loading Prelude... done.
pugs>
We are now ready to run our canonical first Perl 6 program:
pugs> say "Hello, world!"
Hello, world!
Bool::True
pugs>
The C<say> builtin works just like C<print>, but puts a newline at the
end. You'll find there are many small improvements of this sort. Since
we are in an interactive environment, we also got the result of the
whole expression we'd evaluated; in this case the print was successful,
so it returned a true boolean value. You can also run this program from
the command line. Would it be Perl if you couldn't?
$ pugs -e 'say "Hello, world!"'
Hello, world!
$
If you like OOP, you'd be pleased to see that this works as well:
"Hello, world!".say;
[[ Not sure the following bit isn't too much of a digression at this
point. I'd like to make the point about lists being candidates for method
invocation but maybe arrange this to come later. ]]
As does this:
"Hello, world!".split("").join("").say;
Everything can be used like an object in Perl 6. In the last example,
the string is getting the C<split> method invoked on it; the result,
a list, responds to the C<join> method and returns a string, which is
printed by C<say>. Of course, you could spell this in longhand the same
way as you could in Perl 5:
my $original = "Hello, world!";
my @characters = split "", $original;
my $rejoined = join "", @characters;
print $rejoined, "\n";
[[ (EM) this seems overstating it to me... the real P5 equivalent would be:
print join("",split //,"Hello, world!"),"\n";
]]
[[ (GY) sure. This section needs work; I was steering this towards the
point below that this isn't "just" a chain of builins, it's a chain of
builins dispatched as methods. Leaving for now until I word it better. ]]
# This code is valid Perl 5 and Perl 6. You will often
# find Perl 5 code works as is, or with little modification,
# in Perl 6.)
But aggregates can be treated like objects too, so C<@characters.join("")>
works in Perl 6 where C<< @characters->join("") >> didn't in Perl 5. (Yes,
C<< -> >> is uniformly a dot now.)
[[ End digression. ]]
=head2 Who's this new dog?
[[ XXX: WRITEME ]]
=head2 A Catalog of Cool
Perl 6 offers many cleanups and rationalizations over Perl 5, as well as
some shiny new features. If you've been programming Perl 5 for a while
you may have gotten used to some quirks of the language, so much that
you don't see what the fuss is about and why you'd like to learn Perl 6.
I'll list just a few things, and limit myself to what Pugs already supports.
=over 4
=item Function signatures
Up until now, subs in Perl didn't have much by way of formal parameter
specification. Sure, this made them very flexible (take a C<@_>
and do whatever you like with it), but it also meant that for fairly
straightforward things like argument validation or default values you
had to write code yourself, or rely on on an external module.
Take the following (Perl 5) code:
sub make_car {
my $model = shift || die "no model";
my $color = shift || "black";
my $doors = shift || 4;
# ...
Expressing parameters is flexible, yes, but it's also tedious. Even
where there are no default values there can be trouble: for example, if
you decide you don't like multiple calls to C<shift> and consistently
code in this style:
sub my_func {
my($foo, $bar, $baz) = @_;
# ...
Beginners (and insufficiently caffeinated late-night hackers) can easily
make one of the following disastrous mistakes:
my ($foo, $bar, $baz); # oops, forgot " = @_"
my ($foo, $bar, $baz) = shift; # oops, used shift() instead of "@_"
my $single_arg = @_; # oops, will usually be 1
The Perl 6 compiler has syntax to save you from all this. Here's how
you spell out the car example:
sub make_car ($model, $color? = "black", Int $doors? = 4) { ... }
This single line does more than the four Perl 5 lines did. First, it
specifies that the function receives three parameters, one of which is
mandatory. The C<?> in C<$black?> and C<$doors?> means they are optional;
in both cases default values are supplied. You don't have to give one:
the default default is undef. On the other hand, if you do give a default,
the C<?> itself becomes optional.
The C<Int> mark on the last parameter means calling the function with a
non-integer will raise an error. As you can see, this is an optional feature:
you don't have to declare types everywhere.
How is this C<make_car> used? These are obvious:
[[ (EM) Maybe source code examples should adhere to PBP ?? ]]
make_car("VW Beetle", "green", 2);
make_car("Ford Model T"); # black, 4-doored
make_car(); # error: model not supplied
make_car("Fiat", "Red", 3, "sunroof"); # error: too many args
But there's more. Ever used a library that has functions with many
parameters? It can get kind of hard to keep track of their order. This
is why many complex libraries use hashes for named args, but coding up
validation for that is once again tedious. Perl 6 lets I<any> function
be called with named args automatically:
make_car(doors => 2, model => "VW Beetle")
$widget.add_accelerator(signal => "clicked",
group => $accel_group,
key => GDK_n,
mods => GDK_MOD1_MASK,
flags => GTK_ACCEL_VISIBLE);
You've probably seen Perl 5 functions that go out of their way to accept
either positional args, or a hash or hashref with named args. There's no
need to do that any more. If you have a function you'll be calling many
times with a changing set of arguments, you can keep them in a hash and
use the I<splat> operator C<*> to flatten it:
sub make_many_cars ($howmany) {
my @cars;
for 1 .. $howmany { # the parens can be omitted here in Perl 6
my %car_prefs = get_user_prefs();
push @cars, make_car(*%car_prefs);
}
return @cars;
}
=item Lightweight closure syntax
Every block acts like a closure in Perl 6. The syntax is at once simplified
-- you don't need to say C<sub> to declare anonymous pieces of code -- and
extended to include formal parameters.
my $beeper = { say "beep!" }; # $beeper is a coderef. No need for "sub".
$beeper(); # says "beep!". No perl5ish "->" here.
my $square = -> $x { $x * $x }; # use "->" to introduce args
my @squares = map $square, 1 .. 10;
Control structures typically take closures, so you can, as in the example
below, iterate with C<for> with more than one element every time. C<zip>
is a function that takes a few lists and returns interleaves their
elements:
for zip @Xs, @Ys -> $x, $y {
push @differences, $x - $y;
}
Of course, this kind of thing is usually better expressed with map,
which can also take more than one element at a time.
# Infix "¥" means the same thing as "zip"; this is a visual analogy.
# See the sidebar on Unicode operators for details.
my @differences = map -> $x, $y { $x - $y }, @Xs ¥ @Ys;
There's even a feature for the extremely lazy: formal parameters with
no predeclaration. Variables mentioned in a closure that have the C<^>
secondary sigil (called "twigil" in Perl 6 speak) are all inferred as
parameters to the block.
my @differences = map { $^x - $^y }, @Xs ¥ @Ys;
How does this compare with Perl 5? If C<@Xs> and C<@Ys> can be assumed to be
the same length, then this isn't too bad, though the explicit subscripting
does make it less elegant:
my @differences = map { $Xs[$_] - $Ys[$_] } 0 .. $#Xs;
If we want to allow for lists of different length, though, we need a
solution that's much more involved:
sub map2 (&@) {
my ($code, @list) = @_;
my @output;
while (@list) {
my($x, $y) = splice @list, 0, 2;
push @output, $code->($x, $y);
}
return @output;
}
sub zip2 (\@\@) {
my($Xs, $Ys) = @_;
my @output;
for my $i (0 .. max(scalar(@$Xs), scalar(@$Ys))) {
push @output,
($i < scalar(@$Xs) ? $Xs->[$i] : undef),
($i < scalar(@$Ys) ? $Ys->[$i] : undef);
}
return @output;
}
sub max { $_[0] > $_[1] ? $_[0] : $_[1] }
my @differences = map2 { $_[0] - $_[1] } zip2(@Xs, @Ys);
This took care of throwing undef instead of missing values from
the shorter list, while not growing the original. It even uses some
fancy prototypes to avoid gratitious syntax (the C<sub> keyword and
reference-taking backslashes). It is much longer than the Perl 6 version,
but also less efficient (two temporary copies of the whole data are
created in memory -- the Perl 6 version never allocates even I<one>
extra copy). Since we used prototypes, the utility functions need to be
declared above the actual code (or stowed in a module, of course). But
the strongest point against this is how it isn't extensible; if you
wanted to take the differences of elements in I<three> lists, you'd need
to write more support code. In Perl 6, you just say
my @differences = map { $^x - $^y - $^z }, @Xs ¥ @Ys ¥ @Zs;
=item Many (but systematically arranged) operators
If non-ASCII operators and parameters that don't need to be declared
haven't blown your mind yet, good. The two-list difference operation
from the last section could also be written like this:[1]
my @differences = @Xs »-« @Ys;
C<< »« >> is the I<hyper> metaoperator that take a regular operator and lift it
to work on lists. You can still use them when you don't have I<two> lists:
my @halves = @original »/« 2; # 2 is upgraded to "(2, 2, 2, ...)"
Relatedly, there's a way to I<reduce> long expressions, such as sums or
products, with the C<[]> metaoperator:
my $sum = [+] (1, 2, 3, 4); # 1 + 2 + 3 + 4
my $prod = [*] (1, 2, 3, 4); # 1 * 2 * 3 * 4
If these sound a little too abstract, rest assured that they do become
quite handy after you get used to them. Let's introduce two nice and
less funky improvements. The first is a new syntax for quoting words,
similar to Perl 5's C<qw>:
my @suspects = <Hockney McManus Fenster Keaton Verbal>;
Like C<qw> in Perl 5, C<< <...> >> single-quotes its arguments. If you
want interpolation, you can use the C<< «...» >> variant.
The second convenient new operator is C<//>, the I<defined-or> operator.
You'd typically use it like this:
my $output_file = lookup("output_file") // $DEFAULT_FILENAME;
In Perl 5, you might use C<||> but risk the gotcha of the config value being
set to a file called "C<0>". You'd have to spell this the long way:
my $output_file = defined lookup("output_file") ?
lookup("output_file") : $DEFAULT_FILENAME;
This becomes especially annoying when you want to check in more than
one place (for example, what if you can also get the output file from an
environment variable?). Which brings me to the point of the digression,
which was to suggest that if you had a function to C<interrogate>
a suspect, you could talk to them one by one until you had an answer:
my $answer = [//] map &interrogate, <Hockney McManus Fenster Keaton Verbal>;
It's important to note that unlike Perl 5, map is I<lazy>, which means
it only "eats up" one element of input as an element of output is
required. In this case, Verbal may not feel the heat at all if (say)
McManus talks first.[2]
Another developement that's taken place is the normalization of bitwise
operators. Where you once had C<$x | $y> mean different things depending
on whether the two variables were numbers or string -- with the kludgy
C<(0+$x) | (0+$y)> workaround guard to force numeric interpretation --
the operators now explicitly state what kind of context they impose. This
means that the amount of operators is large, but it is very clear what
they do. The idea is that these operators now take a mandatory prefix:
C<+>, C<~>, or C<?>; they stand for numeric, string, or boolean context.
# Perl 5
print 7 & 54; # 6
print "7" & "54"; # "5"
# Perl 6
print 7 +& 54; # 6
print "7" +& "54"; # 6
print 7 ~& 54; # "5"
print "7" ~& "54"; # "5"
[[ more: mention C<.> again, and C<~>. We don't want to turn into S03
here but these things are all pretty prominent when someone sees p6 code
for the first time. ]]
=item Junctions
Now that C<|>, C<&>, and C<^> no longer mean bitwise operations, they are
free to be used for something else: junctions. These are several values
lumped up into one. They are useful in clarifying logic expressions:
my $options = '--help' | '-d' | '-e';
if all($x, $y, $z) eq $options {
say "All options are valid!";
}
[[ XXX: this example is stolen from Autrijus's Apocalypse Now talk. Maybe
think of something else? ]]
=item Cleaned-up OOP
When version 5 introduced object-oriented programming to Perl, it did
so with a minimal change to the existing syntax. It also mandated very
little about how objects are arranged: the vast majority of Perl 5
classes pick blessed hashrefs for their all-around usefulness, but the
object system itself is flexible and can use other things, such as
arrays or even glob references. Certainly this has afforded authors with great
creativity and power, but it has also made learning Perl OOP a little
more difficult than it needed to be. If you do use the de-facto standard
of hash elements for object fields, you are at risk of falling for some
of the most frustrating bugs, the kind you don't feel you'd learned
anything from after you'd spent hours hunting them down:
$self->{colour} = "red";
print $self->{color}; # oops!
By rights, this should be something the compiler catches, and in Perl 6,
it is. Classes are more than "just" packages. Instance variables are
declared with the new C<has> keyword:
class Car;
has $.model;
has $.color;
has Int $.doors;
For this money, you get a constructor with basic initialization, and
three automatic accessors that can act as lvalues.
my $wheels = Car.new(model => "Fast 'un");
$wheels.doors = 2;
$wheels.color = "red";
If you want, you can provide your own C<BUILD> method that has the
class-specific smarts. For example, it may give a default color, or limit cars
to a certain number of doors.
The C<.> twigil meant the members above were public, and so they had
accessors created for them which are visible outside the class. You can
also declare private members:
has Int $!odometer; # note "!" twigil, meaning "private".
has Location $!loc; # let's assume there is a Location class.
# ...
$wheels.odometer -= 100; # nice try, but it won't work.
Methods are now declared with a keyword of their own. This distinguishes
them from regular C<sub>s, and also means that you don't have to declare
the invocant (by convention often called C<$self> or C<$this> in Perl 5)
yourself.
method beep { say "beep!" }
method drive (Location $destination) {
$!odometer += $!loc.distance($destination);
$!loc = $destination;
self.beep;
}
There is, of course, much more to OOP in Perl, but there's no room to
discuss it here. We'll just mention the idea of Roles, where a class
declares what kind of things it I<does>. Part of the implementation of a
class may be taken directly from the providing Role. It works differently
from inheritance and is worth looking into.
=back
=head2 SIDEBAR: Confused by Unicode?
Perl 6 defines a few operators that aren't ASCII, though they all have
ASCII fallbacks. Here's the current (short) core list:
Op Fallback Meaning
«...» <<...>> Interpolating word quotes
¥ Y or &zip Zip lists together
Since it's easy to add new operators, expect mathematical modules to say things like
⌈$PI⌉ to mean 4.
[[ Those are Unicode LEFT CEILING and RIGHT CEILING, U+2308 and
U+2309. They look just like square brackets with the lower serifs
sawn off. Sorry about the pain it must be to include this, it's worth
mentioning since this kind of thing is definitely going to show up in
Perl 6 code. ]]
The file C<docs/quickref/unicode> in the Pugs distribution explains how
to type Unicode in popular editors.
=head2 The C<examples/> directory
When you download Pugs, you get plenty of working example code to play with.
Let's look at a few of the things there.
=head3 examples/network/http-client.p6
#!/usr/bin/pugs
use v6;
say "*** Fetching from the Jerk It (tm) RSS feed...";
my $hdl = connect("www.phreeow.net", 80);
$hdl.say(
"GET /cgi-bin/jerkme.rss HTTP/1.0\n",
"Host: www.phreeow.net\n"
);
$hdl.flush;
if ($hdl.slurp ~~ rx:perl5{<description>(.+)</description>\s*</item>}) {
say $0;
}
else {
say "*** Oops, connection failed."
}
This example is one of the oldest, added two months after the Pugs project
started. It implements a very simple web client. The code is fairly
straightforward, but it illustrates a few features of Perl 6 and of Pugs.
First, you'll notice that C<connect> returns an object that's used in a
totally OOPish way. At the time this was added, networking wasn't fully
specced: expect this to be called something like C<Socket.connect> in the
official Perl 6 specification, though there may very well be an C<IO::All>-ish
way to create lazily defined IO objects as well. Pugs just went away
and implemented a reasonable approximation.
The client speaks very simple HTTP, C<.flush>es the request to make sure
it's sent over the wire, and analyzes the response. This line is worth
breaking down:
if ($hdl.slurp ~~ rx:perl5{<description>(.+)</description>\s*</item>}) { ... }
# Perl 5 equivalent
sub slurp { local $/; readline shift } # works on open filehandles only
my $response = slurp($hdl);
if ($response =~ m{<description>(.+)</description>\s*</item>}x) { ... }
The basic idea is clear -- get the whole HTTP response, perform a
capturing pattern match. There are a few important details though. First,
both P5 and P6 versions of the code use Perl 5 regular expressions for the
match. Perl 6 defines a new language called Rules, but an implementation
wasn't available when this code was written, so it used a Perl 5 regex
instead. As you can see, these are accessible through C<rx:perl5>, which is the
C<rx> Rule keyword with the C<perl5> I<adverbial modifier> attached to it.
[[
XXX: not sure if this is worth the break in pace--
You omit the modifier if you want a P6 rule; and just like you can omit
C<m> in Perl 5 if you just want to C</match something/>, you could do
the same if you were using C</> as your delimiters. In full Perl 6,
this line becomes:
..and then port the regex to a rule, which kinda shows XML is annoying
to pattern match quickly and dirtily. So maybe skip this.
]]
Regardless of which pattern engine is used, the capture, if successful,
goes to C<$0> and not C<$1> as it would in Perl 5. The other difference
is that instead of using C<=~>, we now use C<~~> to match. The change
is not just one of spelling: C<~~> is the shiny new I<smart match>
operator, which has very well-defined semantics for matching anything
against anything else. That is, you know in advance what it'd do if you
say something like C<%hash ~~ @array> or C<$dow ~~ (0 .. 7)>.
=head3 examples/games/animals.p6
$ ./pugs examples/games/animals.p6
Is it a dog (yes/no)? n
No!? What was it then? cat
And a question that distinguishes a dog from a cat would be? Does it purr?
And for a cat, the answer would be... (yes/no)? y
Play again? (yes/no)? y
Does it purr? (yes/no)? y
Is it a cat (yes/no)? y
I got it!
Play again? (yes/no)? n
Bye!
{('no' => 'dog'), ('question' => 'Does it purr?'), ('yes' => 'cat')}
$
The code for this simple guessing game is just a little too long to
fit here, so I'm just going to highlight some nice features. The program
tries to guess what animal you are thinking of; if it fails it asks for
distinctive knowledge it can use next time. Obviously, this knowledge is
expressed in some data structure: the nice thing about this example is
that the last thing it does when exiting is dump this structure. Or rather,
the really nice thing about this is the code to do it:
say $info.perl;
C<.perl> is similar to C<Data::Dumper>, but is built into perl. It
provides sensible serialization for objects as well. If the Pugs hackers
have their way, you can expect an analogous C<.yaml> method too, although
it may not be in the core.
Recall the smart match operator from the previous example, and let's
look at this snippet of code:
given $input {
when "y" { 1 }
when "n" { 0 }
default { yes($q) }
}
This is Perl 6's switch statement. C<given> sets C<$_> (the I<topic> as
it's now called) to be C<$input>, and then runs the code in the block.
Each C<when> block performs a smart match against the topic -- it's
shorthand for something like
if $_ ~~ "y" { 1 } else { ... }
The beauty of this construct is that smart matches work on I<everything>,
so you can have code like this:
given $food {
when "My tortilla" { say "hey! give it back!" }
when Pizza | Lazagna { .eat }
when .caloric_value > $doctors_orders { warn "no, no no" } # XXX: make this work
}
=head2 More information
L<http://pugscode.org/> - The Pugs homepage. Contains links to code and
binaries, presentations and talks, journals and news, automatic smoke
test results.
L<http://planet.pugscode.org/> - PlanetSix aggregates the development
journals of leading Perl6/Pugs personnel, as well as semiweekly summaries
of the Perl 6 mailing lists.
L<http://svn.openfoundry.org/pugs/> - Subversion repository of the pugs
code, which you can browse with a web client. Check out the C<examples/>
folder!
The C<#perl6> channel on C<irc.freenode.org> - Come hang out with the
hackers! This channel seldom sleeps as developers come from all around
the world.
L<http://dev.perl.org/perl6/doc/synopsis.html> - The Perl 6 Synopses
are summaries of the longer Apocalypse and Exegesis documents, and are
more up-to-date. In fact, they function as a specification for Perl 6
implementations, Pugs included. They are, like Pugs, a work in progress.
=head1 FOOTNOTES
[1] Yes, C<<< @Xs »-« @Ys »-« @Zs >>> also works.
[2] C<//> is scheduled for inclusion in perl 5.10. For those interested,
patches are available for existing version all the way back to 5.6.
=head1 AUTHOR INFORMATION
This article was written by Gaal Yahas E<lt>L<gaal@forum2.org>E<gt>
with the help and inspiration of #perl6. It is distributed
under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license
L<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/>.
Thanks to Eric Hodges and Elizabeth Mattijsen for material suggestions.
=cut