my a = fn { local $v= _[0] %~=->
for 'dict.txt'.IO.words -> $word {
say "$word probably rhymes with Perl"
if $word ~~ /[ea?|u|i] rl $/;
say "$word is a palindrome"
if $word eq $word.flip;
}If I had to guess, ‘foo.IO.words’ probably turns ‘foo’ into an IO object of some sort and then reads words. (Whether it reads the whole file into a string and splits that into words, or if it just reads the next word generator/iterator-style is not especially relevant.) An error throws an exception, like it would in Python or Ruby ‘open('dict.txt')’.
Also I kinda doubt that ‘loop over lines and split them into words’ is more readable than ‘.words’ which presumably does exactly what it says on the tin.
A word is probably defined by either \b or UAX #29. (And since IIRC one of the goals of Perl6 is good support for Unicode, \b hopefully uses the word boundary algorithm in that appendix.)
use warnings;
use autodie;
It's a bit of a trap, I agree and we should fix it. Having all exceptions listed is on the list and will add another few hundred man hours to the nearly 5000 we invested in the docs so far.
If you really want to be verbose you can always write `open('foo.txt', :r).Str.split(/\W/)`. If you learn a new language there will be buildins that are well tested and may be more efficient then your solution (it isn't right now for your example. Rakudo does it exactly your way). It can be worth your time to learn what the standard library provides you with -- in any language that is.
The lack of feedback from actual language users did slow down Perl 6 development and esp. getting all the holes in the docs plugged.
What is that? It certainly isn't Perl (5 or 6).