And so we begin...

First attempt at writing a blog, diving into Perl 6.

Having looked at Perl 6 for the first time in quite a while and finding it interesting, I decided to take a shot at porting the Test::Simple distribution to Perl 6. This wound up being a bit more difficult than I expected, as I realized more and more that it wasn't as easy to find how things translated from Perl 5 to Perl 6 as I would have liked.

This, in turn, led to digging around for information and finally thinking "someone should write some documentation pointing the way from, for instance, caller() to callframe()... " And so I find myself down the rabbit hole. Fortunately, it's a relatively clean and comfortable rabbit hole so far.

You can find my efforts at https://github.com/dha/perl5-to-perl6-docs (and a simple implementation of an interpreter for HQ9+ in Perl 6 at https://github.com/dha/hq9plus-in-perl6).

Currently, I am working on ideas for two documents that may be of particular interest to people coming from Perl 5 to Perl 6: Essentials (for instance, you almost certainly need to know that the operator for method calls has changed from the arrow to the dot, but you probably don't have an immediate need to know that the bit shift operators have changed), and Interesting New Stuff in Perl 6 (typing, lazy lists, placeholder variables, etc). Certainly any suggestions as to what should go into these documents (i. e. what would actually be essential or interesting) will be appreciated. The lists of topics for those documents are currently in the github repository as SubjectsForEssentials.txt and SubjectsForNewStuffYouMayWant.txt

I'm going to try to blog about this process, and about Perl 6, regularly. Hopefully I will be successful.

*crosses fingers*