You surely heard about the upcoming Perl 6 language. This language will be endowed with a set of features so rich that every Greek and Trojan is eager to see a full working implementation. Among these features, there are operators, many of them. Perl 6 was even said to be an operator-oriented language, with a yet larger diversity than Perl 5 already has.

A glance of the current operators of Perl 6 may be seen at Section “Operator Precedence” of Synopsis 3. A beautiful graphical illustration of this (outdated by now) is the Periodic Table of the Operators.

For helping me tune with the current development of Perl 6 (whose design is very much in flux yet) and to offer the reader a feeling of what to expect, I am starting a series of brief articles, each approaching one operator or a closely related group to compose a picture of how Perl 6 operators will help us do the job (any job, like Perl 5 did for us).

Each article will be summitted to review by the Perl 6 community to make sure about the relevance and up-to-date-ness of these articles.

This series will be kindly sponsored by a Perl 6 microgrant, announced here. The resulting articles will also be integrated into Pugs’ documentation and licensed under the same terms.

This entry will also hold an index to these articles, serving as a central reference where to look at.

Introduction

This article

The zip operator

To traverse arrays in parallel — the Z operator

String concatenation

The renamed ~ operator

Repeat operators

Repeating strings and lists with x and xx

Coercion operators

Forcing primitive contexts with +, ~ and ?.

Comparisons - Part I

The relational operators <, >, … and chaining syntax.

Comparisons - Part II

The sort comparison operators <=>, leg and cmp.

Boolean operators

Turning values into True/False with ?&, ?| and ?^

The Default Operator

The defined-or // operator

Range Operators

Building ranges with infix .. and variants

Negated operators

Creating negated relational operators with !

The Conditional Operator

If-then-else expressions built with ?? and !!

The Cross Operator

Combining lists with the X operator