Course of Raku / Advanced / Containers

Scalar containers

As the name suggests, scalar containers host single (scalar) values. Such containers are marked with the $ sigil.

Here is one of the simplest and most direct uses of a scalar:

my $lang = 'Raku';

The $lang variable is a scalar container.

By default, scalar containers do not enforce a type on the data, so you can store a value of any type in them. The simplest demonstration of this is that you can reuse the same variable to store an integer and then a string:

my $value = 42;
$value = 'forty-two';

(The author does not encourage you to programm like this.)

Internally, this means that, by default, a new container can keep values of the Any type. Any is the base type for most other types, such as Int or Str.

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