Perl 6 is Smalltalk

Masak kindly pointed the general public to a blog post that talks about how awesome Smalltalk is.
The example presented there reads:

a < b
  ifTrue: [^'a is less than b']
  ifFalse: [^'a is greater than or equal to b']

The basic idea is that ifTrue and ifFalse are methods on the class Bool. Perl 6 don’t got that and I thought it would be tricky to add because augment enum doesn’t work. After some tinkering I found that augment doesn’t really care what you hand it as long as it is a class. As it happens Rakudo doesn’t check if the class is really a class, it simply looks for a type object with the provided name. The following just works.

use MONKEY-TYPING;
augment class Bool {
    method ifTrue(&c){ self ?? c(self) !! Nil; self }
    method ifFalse(&c){ self ?? Nil !! c(self); self }
}

(1 < 2)
    .ifTrue({say ‚It's True!‘})
    .ifFalse({ say ‚It's False!‘});

If we call only one of the new methods on Bool, we could even use the colon form.

(True)
    .ifTrue: { say "It's $^a!" };

As you likely spotted I went a little further as Smalltalk by having the added methods call the blocks with the Bool in question. Since Block got a single optional positional parameter the compiler wont complain if we just hand over a block. If a pointy block or a Routine is provided it would need a Signature with a single positional or a slurpy.

Please note that augment on an enum that we call a class is not in the spec yet. A bug report was filed and judgement is pending. If that fails there is always the option to sneak the methods into the type object behind Bool at runtime via the MOP.

And so I found that Perl 6 is quite big but still nice to talk about.

UPDATE: There where complains that IfTrue contained an if statement. That’s was silly and fixed.