Using simple built-in data types

Perl 6 comes with a number of various built-in types that cover the common range of things, such as Booleans, integers, and strings, but also offers unusual data types. We will cover them in this section. To demonstrate the built-in types, we will print them to the console using the say function, as we did in the ‘Hello, World!’ example.

The hierarchy is built using two types of items: roles and classes. Roles are drawn in ovals, while classes are rectangle boxes. Roles are similar to interfaces in some programming languages. In this chapter, we won't focus on the details of what is a role or a class. You can learn that in detail in Chapter 8, Object-Oriented Programming. For now, we will assume that you have some basic understanding of object-oriented programming and will be able to understand the hierarchy of the data types.

In the following sections of this chapter, we will go through the main data types that you may use in your practice.