Day 11 – Testing your Times Tables with Perl 6

It’s nearly the end of Winter term at Elf Primary School near the North Pole. A keen head for figures is very important to elves, and the little elves’ numeracy teacher, Ms Hopper, wants to make sure they keep up their arithmetical skills right up to the penultimate day of term. (The last day of term is reserved for watching films and playing shove-ha’penny).

The little elves have just learned their times tables (multiplication tables) up to 12, but they aren’t all as good at it as they’d like to be, and some of them will be helping out in the toy workshops just before Christmas, when they may need to quickly tell the big elves how many more toys of a particular type to make.

Fortunately Elf Hopper is a very smart elf with an excellent head for figures – and code – herself. So she whips up a quick console app to run on the little elves’ school-issue Perlix 6.0 boxen.

The program allows the little elves to test themselves on their 2 to 12 times tables by just running it, or if they supply a single numeric argument, they can try out any multiplication table they like.