wimvanderbauwhede

Reconstructing Raku's Junctions

Junctions in Raku are cool but at first glance they do not follow the rules for static typing. I was curious about their formal typing semantics, so I deconstructed and then reconstructed junctions from a functional, static typing perspective.

Junctions in Raku

Raku has this neat feature called Junctions. A junction is an unordered composite value. When a junction is used instead of a value, the operation is carried out for each junction element, and the result is the junction of the return values of all those operators. Junctions collapse into a single value when used in a Boolean context. Junctions can be of type all (&), any (|), one (^) or none (empty junction).

For example,

0racle

One of Larry's purported factors in the design of Camelia (and by extension, Perl 6) was to appeal to 7 year old girls (and by extension, people new to programming in general).

In addition, another design principle of Perl6 was to make it "less Unix centric". Whereas Perl had s/// and tr///, Perl 6 retains these but adds subst and trans, which is friendlier to new programmers, and self-documenting to some degree.

It seems odd, then, that we still have the grep operator named so. Even in Perl, grep - as in globally search a regular expression and print - bears little resemblance to what it actually does. It's more of a filter, filtering elements out that do not evaluate True to a given expression.

What then would be it's alternative friendly name? Taking into account these design principles...

• Context Sensitive: A term or symbol might do different things in different context

AlexDaniel

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I moved this page to rakudo wiki. A lot of people wanted to add stuff, but gists are not editable. A wiki is a more appropriate place for this kind of stuff. Rakudo wiki is possibly not the best place for it, but for now that will do.

Plus, GitHub gists totally suck when unicode characters are involved. There's also no preview option here. So I'm glad that it is being moved.

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Recently Perl 6 got support for various unicode characters (½ ¹ ∞ × ÷, see this link for a full list), but I don't think that we are done. Here is a list of things to think about.