thundergnat has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I've been playing around a bit with Rakudo * and haven't been able to figure out the syntax to use the DATA filehandle. I'm beginning to suspect that it hasn't been implemented yet.

Google yielded meager results; the most promising was the preliminary "Learning Perl6" book by merlyn and brian_d_foy. It was written in 2007 however, based on pugs, and syntax has drifted since then.

I checked the Rakudo test suite to see if I could find a test using a DATA fh but didn't turn up anything.

Anyone have any pointers to documentation about this? (Even documentation saying "It isn't implemented yet."?)

From "Learning Perl6": (Doesn't work in Rakudo *)

for =$=DATA {
    .say
}

=begin DATA
1
2
3
4
5
=end

[download]

Returns:

===SORRY!===
Non-declarative sigil is missing its name at line 3, near "$=DATA {\n 
+"

[download]

I tried some different things but started hearing dominus commenting in my head so figured I would be better off asking.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Rakudo * DATA filehandle syntax
by moritz (Cardinal) on Aug 11, 2010 at 16:47 UTC
    Rakudo doesn't support DATA sections yet.

    Even if it did, reading from a file handle has a different syntax now, you'd write 

    for $=DATA.lines {
...
}

    [download]

    Since "Learning Perl 6" seems out of date, I can only point you to the latest download of Using Perl 6. Different target audience, and also a work in progress, but we do try to track spec changes when they occur :-)

    Perl 6 - links to (nearly) everything that is Perl 6.
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Re: Rakudo * DATA filehandle syntax
by molecules (Monk) on Aug 11, 2010 at 16:44 UTC
    I don't know about the state of implementation for the DATA filehandle (and I've tried several variations to no avail). However, reading from a file seems to work fine: 
    my $data_fh = open 'data.txt';
for $data_fh.lines {
    .say
}

    [download]
[reply]
[d/l]

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