[Purdue-pm] Perl 6

[Mark Senn]

If you've been putting off learning Perl 6 because it runs slow,
for the things I use it for it is getting faster most every month.

The rest of the message is excerpted from
https://developers.slashdot.org/story/16/07/14/1349207/the-slashdot-interview-with-larry-wall

Proud Rooster:

    How can we get PERL into the browser?

Larry Wall [the creator of Perl]:

    Our rakudo compiler for Perl 6 was designed to have multiple
    backends. Currently we support both MoarVM and JVM, but others are
    planned. In particular, a Javascript backend is already underway, and
    has progressed to the stage of being bootstrapped in NQP (that is, "Not
    Quite Perl", the restricted subset of Perl 6 that rakudo itself is
    written in), so the JS backend is most of the way to being able to
    compile and run the full rakudo compiler, and once it can do that, most
    of the rest of Perl 6 is already written in Perl 6, so someday in the
    not-so-distant future you'll be able to compile and run Perl 6 anywhere
    you can run Javascript.

    At some point, the Nativecall library will also be ported, which gives
    full access to pretty much any C shared library, as well as embedded
    Perl 5, Python, or what have you, as well as their associated
    libraries. (Of course, sandboxing might get in the way of that in a
    browser, not to mention you can't rely on what the user has or hasn't
    installed on the client anyway.)

    By the way, the MoarVM backend uses libuv, so our semantics should not
    be very far from what Node.js supports.

Some example Perl 6 code from later in the article:

    sub postfix:<!> ($n) { [*] 1..$n }
    say 42!;

    Even if you don't know the language, you can see that it's defining some
    sort of postfix operator called "!", which if you're at all familiar
    with math, will look like a factorial. The parameter in parens looks a
    lot like a parameter in many other languages. But instead of an explicit
    loop or recursive definition, we're doing something to what is obviously
    a range from 1 to $n. The prefix [*] is apparently related to the * of
    multiplication somehow, and maybe the [] are indicating some kind of
    list processing, since other parts of the program might be composing
    lists using []. Together with the ! hint, it's probably sufficient for
    you to deduce that [*] is some kind of reduce-with-multiplication
    operator (sometimes called a "fold" if you're coming at it from the
    functional programming end of things).

    So you try this snippet, and find it prints:
        1405006117752879898543142606244511569936384000000000
    which you immediately recognize as 42 factorial. :-)

    You might also be delighted that, without any extra work on your part,
    it didn't overflow your native integer type.

-mark