my $date = Date.new(2017, 7, 19);
say $date; # 2017-07-19

To create a variable based on today's date, use the today method, as follows:

my $today = Date.today;
say $today; # 2017-07-17

To clone a date, call clone, as follows:

my $date2 = $today.clone;

say $date.year;  # 2017
say $date.month; # 7
say $date.day;   # 19

Additionally (and this is already a nice bonus), the Date class can calculate the day of the week (Monday is 1, Sunday is 7):

say $date.day-of-month; # 19 (same as $date.day)
say $date.day-of-year;  # 20

say $date.week;        # (2017 29)
say $date.week-number; # 29
say $date.week-year;   # 2017

For the weeks in January, the year returned by the week and week-year methods may either be the previous or the next year, depending on which week the day belongs to. For example, take the last day of 2019 and the first day of 2020. 31st December, 2019 is a Tuesday and 1st January, 2020 is a Wednesday. Both days belong to the same week, so the week-year method returns 2020. Examine the output of the following program to understand how the method works:

my $d1 = Date.new(2019, 12, 31);
say $d1.day-of-week; # 3
say $d1.year; # 2019
say $d1.week-year; # 2020

my $d2 = Date.new(2020, 1, 1);
say $d2.day-of-week; # 4
say $d2.year; # 2020
say $d2.week-year; # 2020   

There's an interesting weekday-of-month method that returns the number of occurrences of this day of the week in this month before the given date. For example, 19 July, 2017 is the third Wednesday in July 2017:

say $today.later(days => 2);   # 2017-07-19
say $today.later(months => 2); # 2017-07-21

To get yesterday's and tomorrow's date, use the pred and succ methods, which we have already seen in the numeric data types:

say $today.pred; # 2017-07-18
say $today.succ; # 2017-07-20