Using Unicode

The default assumption is that the source of a Perl 6 program uses UTF-8. It gives you the power of the whole spectrum of characters without worrying if it will work. In Perl 5, for example, you had to add special instructions in order to inform the interpreter that you are using non-ASCII characters in the source code. In Perl 6, this is much easier.

First, Unicode characters may be freely used in strings. For example, let's try some Greek and Chinese graphemes, as shown in the following lines of code:

say 'C = 2πr';       # Circumference of a circle
say         # 'Sun' and 'Moon' give 'bright'

The preceding two lines of code will print the corresponding strings as expected:

C = 2πr 

Alternatively, it is possible to refer to the Unicode codepoints by their names. For example, consider the following line of...