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Workshop: Perl 6 regexes and grammars
- Duration
- 8 hours (with 3 breaks)
- Audience
- People with Perl 5 experience
- People with Perl 6 experience
- Developers with no Perl background
- Description
- This course is primarily focused on understanding Perl 6 regexes (regular expressions) and grammars. Both regexes and grammars have many in common with the Perl 5 regexes but offer much more, and often in the more elegant way. We will be creating programs to use the most of regexes and grammars, from simple text matching to a complete compiler of an artificial programming language.
- Requirements
- Understanding of regular regexes (in any language)
- Laptop with internet
- Latest Rakudo Perl 6 installed (optional)
- Contents
- Introduction (1 hour)
- What are regexes?
- Why the new name?
- What’s new in Perl 6?
- What are grammars?
- Perl 6 specification as a Perl 6 grammar
- Input in Perl 6
- How to read from console
- How to read from files
- Part 1. Regexes (3 hours)
- String matching
- Character classes
- Backslashed character classes
- User-defined classes
- Unicode properties
- Quantifiers
- Capturing
- Using [] and ()
- Alternatives with || or |
- The Match object
- Anchors
- Look-ahead and backwards assertions
- Adverbs (modifiers)
- Part 2. Grammars (4 hours)
- What are grammars
- Grammar is a class
- How to create a grammar
- How to parse text with a grammar
- Grammar methods
- regex
- rule
- token
- Reusing methods
- Grammar attributes
- Keeping state
- Avoiding global variables
- Actions
- The Match object in actions
- Actions as a separate class
- Instantiation the actions class
- Debugging a grammar
- Practice
- Creating a calculator
- Parsing numbers (and how Perl 6 does it)
- Parsing Esperanto
- Craft-made compiler of a simple programming language