Name

perlintro -- a brief introduction and overview of Perl 6

AUTHOR

Kirrily "Skud" Robert <skud@cpan.org> (original Author) and Moritz Lenz <moritz@fau2ik3.org> ("translation" to perl 6)

Some fixup by David Koenig <karhu@u.washington.edu>

DESCRIPTION

This document is intended to give you a quick overview of the Perl programming language as of Version 6, along with pointers to further documentation. It is intended as a "bootstrap" guide for those who are new to the language, and provides just enough information for you to be able to read other peoples' Perl and understand roughly what it's doing, or write your own simple scripts.

This introductory document does not aim to be complete. It does not even aim to be entirely accurate. In some cases perfection has been sacrificed in the goal of getting the general idea across. You are strongly advised to follow this introduction with more information from the full Perl manual, the table of contents to which can be found in perltoc.

Throughout this document you'll see references to other parts of the Perl documentation. You can read that documentation using the p6doc command or whatever method you're using to read this document.

What is Perl?

Perl is a general-purpose programming language originally developed for text manipulation and now used for a wide range of tasks including system administration, web development, network programming, GUI development, and more.

The language is intended to be practical (easy to use, efficient, complete) rather than beautiful (tiny, elegant, minimal). Its major features are that it's easy to use, supports procedural, object-oriented (OO) and a bit of functional programming, and has powerful built-in support for text processing. It can also use the large collection of Perl 5 modules.

Running Perl Programs

Currently, the main interpreter is Pugs, available at http://pugscode.org. This is the most complete interpreter so far, but is kind of slow.

Assuming your code is in a file named "foo.p6", you can invoke your program as: