Missing values

Note! This site is about Perl 6.
If you are looking for a solution for Perl 5, please check out the Perl 5 tutorial.

One should ask the question what happens if the list runs out of values in the middle, of a multi-value iteration? That is, what happens to the follow loop?

tutorial/arrays/missing_values.p6

#!/usr/bin/env perl6
use v6;

for (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) -> $x, $y {
    say "$x $y";
}
say 'done';

In this case Rakudo throws an exception when it finds out it does not have enough values for the last iteration. It will look like this, (with a bunch of trace information afterwards).

tutorial/arrays/missing_values.p6.output

1 2
3 4
Not enough positional parameters passed; got 1 but expected 2
  in block <anon> at examples/arrays/missing_values.p6:4

In order to avoid the exception we could tell the loop that the second and subsequent values are optional by adding a question mark after the variable

tutorial/arrays/missing_values_fixed.p6

#!/usr/bin/env perl6
use v6;

for (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) -> $x, $y? {
    say "$x $y";
}
say 'done';

This will work but generate the following output:

tutorial/arrays/missing_values_fixed.p6.output

1 2
3 4
Use of uninitialized value of type Mu in string context.
Methods .^name, .perl, .gist, or .say can be used to stringify it to something meaningful.
   in block <anon> at examples/arrays/missing_values_fixed.p6 line 5
5
done

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