Typing More Or Less

Not too long ago, there was a bit of minor cleanup in the Perl 6 specification regarding the use of whatever (*); there were some inconsistencies in how it behaved, depending on context.

The net result is that you now must use @arr[*-1] to get the last element, you cannot get away with simply using @arr[*].

Some may feel that this extra typing is bothersome, especially if you have a Unicode-friendly keyboard setup.

However, we can sneak our way past this problem by using a constant.

This also works with the current release of Rakudo, so it's not quite science fiction:

constant Ω = *-1;

Or, if you're feeling Cyrillic rather than Greek:

constant Ѡ = *-1;

Now we can substitute our nice constant for *-1 anywhere in the following code:

my @letters = 'a'..'z';
say '→'~@letters[*-1];
→z

Like so:

constant Ω = *-1;
my @letters = 'a'..'z';
say '→'~@letters[Ω];
→z

And, of course, you can do this with other things that are so tedious to type when you're dealing with maths:

constant π = pi;
say '→'~π
→3.14159265358979