Day 19: Whatever

Opening the door to today’s present, you find… Whatever. Yes, Whatever is a type in Perl 6, and it stands for whatever it makes sense in the context it appears in.

Examples:

1..*                 # infinite range

my @x = <a b c d e>;
say @x[*-2]          # indexing from the back of the array
                     # returns 'd'

say @x.map: * ~ 'A'; # concatenate A to whatever the
                     # thing is we pass to it

say @x.pick(*)       # randomly pick elements of @x
                     # until all are used up

So how does this magic work?

Some of these uses are easy to see: A * in term position produces a Whatever object, and some builtins (like List.pick) know what to do with it.

The in term position might need some more explanation: Perl 6 parses predictively; when the compiler reads a file, it always knows whether to expect a term or an operator:

say  2 + 4
|    | | |
|    | | + term (literal number)
|    | + operator (binary +)
|    +  term (literal number)
+ term (listop), which expects another term

So if you write

* * 2

it parses the first * as term, and the second one as an operator.

The line above generates a code block: * * 2 is short for -> $x { $x * 2 }. That’s a thing you can invoke like any other sub or block:

my $x = * * 2;
say $x(4);     # says 8

Likewise

say @x.map: * ~ 'A';

is a shortcut for

say @x.map: -> $x { $x ~ 'A' };

and

say @x.map: *.succ;

is a shortcut for

say @x.map: -> $x { $x.succ };

Whatever is also useful in sorting — for example, to sort a list numerically (a prefix ‘+’ means to obtain a numeric value of something):

@list.sort: +*

And to sort a list as strings (a prefix ‘~’ means to get the string value of something):

@list.sort: ~*

The Whatever-Star is very useful, but it also allows some obfuscation (explanation).

The Whatever-Star was also an inspiration for the planned Rakudo Star release. Because we know that release won’t be a complete implementation of Perl 6, we didn’t want to call it “1.0”. But other release numbers and tags also presented their own points of confusion. Finally it was decided to call it “Rakudo Whatever”, which then became “Rakudo Star”. (Our detailed plans for Rakudo Star are kept the Rakudo repository.)