𒐳 / ༳ == ( ⑽ – 𐹭 ) * ( 𒐲 / 𐅉 ), of course

I just got brian d. foy’s Learning Perl 6 from the library. It’s a pretty good book, though it’ll take a good few readings for some of Perl 6’s features to stick.

Since Perl 6 is built using Unicode from the ground up, it does two rather wonderful things when dealing with numbers:

1. regular expressions match numerals beyond 0–9: ٤ is as much four as 4
2. numeric constants can (pretty much) be expressed in terms of Unicode values in your Perl 6 source code. Assigning π to a variable does what you think it does. Dividing by ¼ is the same as multiplying by, well, ٤.

So herewith a table (probably incomplete, and very unlikely to render properly for you) of Unicode glyphs accepted by Perl 6 as numeric values:

So the title of this post really is accepted as a valid Perl 6 expression in the REPL:

$ perl6
To exit type 'exit' or '^D'
> 𒐳 / ༳ == ( ⑽ - 𐹭 ) * ( 𒐲 / 𐅉 )
True

What does it evaluate to? Well:

• 𒐳 ‘CUNEIFORM NUMERIC SIGN SHAR2 TIMES GAL PLUS MIN’ represents 432000
• ༳ ‘TIBETAN DIGIT HALF ZERO’ represents -½
• ⑽ ‘PARENTHESIZED NUMBER TEN’ represents 10
• 𐹭 ‘RUMI NUMBER FIFTY’ represents 50
• 𒐲 ‘CUNEIFORM NUMERIC SIGN SHAR2 TIMES GAL PLUS DISH’ represents 216000
• 𐅉 ‘GREEK ACROPHONIC ATTIC TEN TALENTS’ represents 10.

Definitely into just because you can doesn’t mean you should territory, and a feature to make the Pythonistas reach for the Zantac again, poor dears.