Course of Raku / Advanced / Scalar containers

Proxying method calls

Being a scalar container actually means to be an object of the Scalar type. The use of scalars is so transparent in most of the cases, so the developer often do not has to think about the container and can imagine working with the assigned values themselves.

Scalar containers proxy method calls to the value that they keep. For example, after the assignment my $lang = 'Raku', you can call the .chars method on the variable:

my $lang = 'Raku';
say $lang.chars; # 4

This program prints 4, which is the number of characters in the string 'Raku'. The result is exactly the same as if you would call .chars on the string, not on the container variable:

say 'Raku'.chars; # 4