Perl 6, Python, hyperoperators and list comprehensions

I use Python every day at work, and I do like the language. There are things about it that annoy me, but I don't think that's ever not been true of any language I've used. One of Python's best features is its list comprehensions. These short snippets of code can embody so much work that it often feels like Python is writing your code for you.

At night, I go home and work on Perl 6, the upcoming update to the decades-old programming language which adds features from nearly every programming language you've ever heard of (and some you haven't). The direct equivalent of the list comprehension in Perl 6 is the same as it was in Perl 5: map. Here's how you use map in Perl 6:

 map {$_ + 10}, (1,2,3,4)

This yields the same list as the Python:

 [ x + 10 for x in 1,2,3,4 ]

Ah, but the astute among you are noticing that the Perl uses a variable name that's always the same, thus making nested map statements painful due to the need to create temporary variable names manually. In Perl 5, this was true, but we can name those temporaries quite easily now:

 map { $^x + 10 }, (1,2,3,4)

Perl sees these temporaries from left to right and considers them positional parameters in the order that they appear to the current block (which is also a closure).

But Perl 6 gives us something more than map. In fact, map will be used much less frequently in Perl 6 because of hyperoperators. A hyperoperator is an operator that takes another operator as a parameter and augments its behavior. In Perl 6, hyperoperators can do this:

 (1,2,3,4) <<+>> 10


or the Unicode equivalent:


 (1,2,3,4) «+» 10

This takes the + operator and makes it work on the list given on the right side, adding the value on the left to each item and returning the newly created list of results. So, we never need to create a closure in order to ask Perl to do some particular binary operation on all elements of a list. Instead, we just pass the list, the operator and the right hand side to a hyperoperator and it does all the heavy lifting. We don't even need to see the temporary variable that's being used.

List comprehensions like Python's [ ... for ... ] and Perl's map are extremely valuable things for doing complex operations, but when what you really want is just to perform a simple operation on the elements of a list, hyperoperators give you what you need without the trappings you don't care about.

Note: There are actually multiple forms of hyperoperator depending on how "DWIMy" (Do What I Mean) you want it to be and on which of its arguments. See Synopsis 3's section on Hyperoperators for more.