Perl 6 - how to get started

Are you curious about Perl 6, and wonder how to get started?

Use proto, Carl Mäsak's Perl 6 installer (which will download parrot and rakudo for you).

Just make sure you have Perl 5 (5.8.8 or 5.10.0), git and svn installed first!

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jani@knuth ~/prog/proto >./proto

*** CONFIG FILE CREATED ***

Greetings. I have created a file 'config.proto' that you may want to review.
Next time you run './proto', these settings will be used to bootstrap your
system into a working Perl 6 installation.

If you're new to this, or if configure settings scare you, you probably want
the default settings anyway. The most important ones are:
Rakudo -> /ping/knuth/home0/jani/prog/rakudo
Projects -> /ping/knuth/home0/jani/prog

jani@knuth ~/prog/proto >./proto
Downloading Perl 6...downloaded
Building Perl 6...

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This part may take a while; parrot is now building stuff for you, and when it's finished, you can run the perl6 binary:

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Building Perl 6...built
jani@knuth ~/prog/proto >cd ../rakudo
jani@knuth ~/prog/rakudo >ls -F
CREDITS MANIFEST Test.pm parrot/ perl6.o perl6_s1.pbc tools/
Configure.pl Makefile build/ perl6* perl6.pbc src/
LICENSE README docs/ perl6.c perl6.pir t/
jani@knuth ~/prog/rakudo >./perl6
> sub sum (*@numbers) { return [+] @numbers; }; say +(sum <1 2 3>)
6

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See? Easy! Now get testing!