Introduction

Raku is a member of the Perl family of programming languages. It has introduced elements of many modern and historical languages. Compatibility with Perl is not a goal, Raku is different from Perl. However, Perl modules can be used in Raku with the help of Inline::Perl.

The Raku language has version numbers v6.c, v6.d, v6.e, and so forth. These are very much like C has C89, C99, and C11. Each language version is defined by its test suite. Rakudo is a Raku implementation, as GCC, Clang, and MSVC are implementations of the C language. While historically several implementations were being written, today only the Rakudo implementation is in active development. For more details, see here.

See Raku website here. For Wikipedia reference and overview see here.

Raku is a high-level, clean, modern, multi-paradigm language that offers procedural, object-oriented AND functional programming methodologies, parallelism, concurrency, asynchrony, definable grammars for pattern matching and generalized string processing, and optional and gradual typing.

This book is written to give an introduction to programming using Raku. Please note that this is a work in progress.

Contributors

• Dr Suman Khanal
• Ashish Khanal