It can be interesting to do operations on existing data structures in Perl 6, but without Input and Output, that would have limited usability in the real world.
Therefore reading from files is a critical operation.
After a break of several months, I rebuild Rakudo on the server, a few days ago, and regenerated the Perl 6 Maven pages. This promptly broke the site. The fix was easy, and as expected the bug was mine.
Today I decided to try Rakudo on my Windows machine as well, but I went for the easy route and installed the pre-built msi file.
Getting started with Rakudo * (2013.01) on Windows
Because of various personal issues I stopped using IRC a while ago. Once in a while I am still joinng the #perl6 channel on, when I have an urgent question, but usually I have enough other distractions.
As I publish articles about Perl 6, once in a while people mention my name, or paste a link to my web site. I don't have time to follow the channel, but I'd like to know when something related to my work is mentioned.
Or just smile I was mentioned on ze Internets!
Luckily Moritz Lenz runs an IRC bot that creates beautiful logs of various IRC channels. Including that of Perl 6.
We are going to write a script that downloads the page containing today's log and check if certain strings were mentioned. If they were, we can dispatch an e-mail.
How to download a web page with Perl 6
When writing a program, one of the best ways to make it reusable is by accepting parameters on the command line.
For example if you are writing a program that needs to parse a log file, you might want to supply the name of the logfile on the command line.
If the application needs to send an e-mail report, it is more generic if the user can supply the address as a command line parameter: --to boss@company
How can you let your Perl 6 application to accept command line arguments?
Parsing command line arguments in Perl 6
