Perl 5 embedding is enabled by default in Pugs. This allows to you use some Perl 5 modules from Perl 6.

Loading and importing from Perl 5

use perl5:CGI;

Currently explict imports work, but implicit ones do not. This works:

use perl5:Time::gmtime <gmtime>;
say gmtime.mday;

Object-Oriented Classes

After loading a Perl5 OO clas, you can use Perl 6 OO notation to call methods on it. See CGI examples below.

Examples of Passing Data to Perl 5

Quick Reference

Strings

 use perl5:CGI;
 my $q = CGI.new('a=Hello');
 say $q.param('a');

Hash references

 use perl5:CGI;
 my $q = CGI.new( { a => "Hello" } );
 say $q.param('a');

This works too:

 my %h = ( a => "Hello" );
 use perl5:CGI;
 my $q = CGI.new(\%h);
 say $q.param('a');

Hashes and Named Arguments

your_perl5_func(%perl6_hash.kv)

Note, Perl 6 does not allow named arguments to start with a dash but Perl 5 does.
Here's an example of using it to pass a named argument starting with a dash:

use perl5:CGI;
my $q = CGI.new;
my $cookie = $q.cookie( %( '-name' => 'Hello', value => 'World' ).kv );
print $cookie;

Code references

You can even pass a Perl 6 code reference to Perl 5 and pass Perl 5 arguments back into the Perl 6 code ref, and have the resulting thing execute.

sub  plus_one (Int $int) { $int+1 }
my $sub = eval('sub { my $p6_coderef = shift; $p6_coderef->(3) }', :lang<perl5>);
my $result = $sub(&plus_one);
print $result; # Correctly prints "4" !

Compiling code as Perl 5

That final example showed how to use eval to compile arbitary code as Perl 5, and have a Perl 5 structure returned:

my $perl5_result = eval('some code',:lang<perl5>);

Examples

• cpan-upload.pl is a Perl 6 program that uses several Perl 5 modules
• t/perl5 is the code in the test suite that tests Perl 5 embedding