Rakudo Babysteps 01 - Starting With Rakudo

Installation

You will obviously need to install Rakudo if you want to use it. There are a couple of options, but I will focus on Rakudo Star. Rakudo Star is a distribution which includes some important libraries and an excellent book.

The easiest way to install Rakudo Star depends on your operating system. Specifically, it depends on whether you’re using Microsoft Windows.

Windows Installer

There is a lovely Rakudo Star installer available for Windows users. It includes all the pieces needed to get started with Rakudo. Look on the Rakudo Star download page for a filename ending in .msi. Right now, that file is rakudo-star.2010.07.msi. It will probably be a different file when you look.

Download that MSI file and run it. Go ahead and accept the defaults, unless you have a good reason not to.

Once you have installed Rakudo, you need to add it to your environment path so that you can run it from the command prompt. Open your Start menu, right click “My Computer”, and select “Properties”. Open the “Advanced” tab, and click the “Environment Variables” button. Scroll through “System Variables” until you see the entry for “Path”. Double click “Path” to open the “Edit System Variable” dialog. Enter the location of your Rakudo installation - probably C:\Rakudo\bin - at the beginning of the “Variable Value” field, followed by the ; path separator character. Click “OK” to close this dialog, “OK” again to close the Environment Variables dialog, then “OK” one more time to close the “System Properties” dialog.

To test, run “Command Prompt” and try perl6 --version.

    C:\> perl6 --version
This is Rakudo Perl 6, version 2010.07-47-g9fd5eaa built on parrot 2.6.0

Copyright 2008-2010, The Perl Foundation
  

Double check your Path environment variable if you don’t see something like this.

It looks like you’ve installed Rakudo!

From Source

    mkdir ~/rakudo
cd rakudo
wget http://github.com/downloads/rakudo/star/rakudo-star-2010.09.tar.gz
tar xfvz rakudo-star-2010.09.tar.gz
cd rakudo-star-2010.09
perl Configure.pl --gen-parrot --prefix=~/rakudo/
make
make rakudo-test
make install
  

Of course, there’s no point installing Rakudo to a custom directory if your shell can’t find it. Add a couple lines to your .bashrc.

    export RAKUDO_HOME=$HOME/rakudo
export PATH=$RAKUDO_HOME/bin:$PATH
  

This will make the perl6 executable available the next time you log in, or you can rush the process by running ~/.bashrc.

    $ . ~/.bashrc
$ perl6 --version

This is Rakudo Perl 6, version 2010.08 built on parrot 2.7.0

Copyright 2008-2010, The Perl Foundation
  

Now that we know Rakudo is installed, let’s take a look at what it gets us.

What Do You Get?

Obviously, you get Rakudo. But Rakudo is built on top of the Parrot virtual machine, so you also get a fresh copy of #parrot. You can learn more about coding directly to the virtual machine at the Parrot Babysteps. And you also get NQP, which is sort of a stripped-down version of Rakudo that makes writing new languages in Parrot a lot easier.

The perl6 Shell

One thing I missed in Perl 5 was a simple interactive shell. There is a debug shell, but it’s not quite the same thing. Fortunately, Rakudo has an interactive shell, and you start it by calling perl6 from the command line.

    $ perl6
>
  

What can we do in this shell? Well, we can print things out.

    > say "Hello, world!"
Hello, world!
  

We can use it as a calculator.

    > 2 + 2
4
  

We can calculate the area of a circle that has a radius of ten units.

    > my $pi = 3.1415926
3.1415926
> my $radius = 10
10
> 2 * $pi * ( $radius ** 2 )
628.31852
  

Okay, you get the idea. There is a lot we can do with the perl6 shell. Let’s start looking a little bit at the Perl 6 language.

First up is variables.

    > my $pi = 3.1415926
3.1415926

> my $name = "Brian"
Brian
> say "Hello, $name - good to see you!"
Hello, Brian - good to see you!"
  

Exciting as that was, it’s time to leave the Perl 6 shell and start writing a simple script. It’s easy enough to quit the shell.

    > exit
$
  

Writing a Perl 6 Program

All we need now to write a Perl 6 program is a text editor. I prefer #vim, which provides syntax highlighting.

    # Do not run on older Perl versions!
use v6;

print "Please enter your name: ";
my $name = $*IN.get;
say "Hello $name - good to see you!";
  

    $ perl6 hello.p6
Please enter your name: Brian
Hello, Brian - good to see you!
  

What Now?