Raku Books / Perl 6 at a Glance / Operators / Meta-operators

Assignment

The assignment meta-operators (=) use the other operators to create the constructions like +=, ~=, etc. The action of the newly created operators is always equivalent to the verbose code.

If you type $a op= $b, then a compiler will execute the following action: $a = $a op $b.

That means that $x += 2 is equivalent to $x = $x + 2, and $str ~= '.' to $str = $str ~ '.'.

Let us now create a new custom operator and see if the assignment meta-operator will be available for us. On purpose, I chose quite an outstanding-looking operator ^_^:

sub infix:<^_^>($a, $b) {
    $a ~ '_' ~ $b
}

First, check the simple usage of the new operator with two operands:

say 4 ^_^ 5; # 4_5

Then, let us try the meta-operator form of it: ^_^=:

my $x = 'file';

$x ^_^= 101;
say $x; # file_101

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