Conditional whenever

I wrote a script to filter iostat because the latter either displays too much or too little. It also doesn’t know about bcache. I wanted to have the script react the same way to pressing q then top, atop or iotop. But it should only watch the keyboard and quit when $*OUT is a terminal. First we need to read the keyboard.

whenever key-pressed(:!echo) {
    when 'q' | 'Q' { done }
}

Now we got a few options to add a check for an attached terminal

if $*OUT.t {
    whenever key-pressed(:!echo) {
        when 'q' | 'Q' { done }
    }
}
$*OUT.t && do whenever key-pressed(:!echo) {
    when 'q' | 'Q' { done }
}
do whenever key-pressed(:!echo) {
    when 'q' | 'Q' { done }
} if $*OUT.t

The last one kind of lines up with other whenever blocks but the condition gets harder to read. At first I thought it wont be possible to use ?? !! because whenever always wants to run .tap on the parameter. But then I remembered that we use 0x90 to tell a CPU to do nothing. If we get a Supply that does nothing we can opt out of doing something.

constant NOP = Supplier.new;
whenever $*OUT.t ?? key-pressed(:!echo) !! NOP {
    when 'q' | 'Q' { done }
}

Now it neatly lines up with other whenever blocks.

As a member of the Perl family Perl 6 has more then one way to do it. Most of them look a big odd though.