Course of Raku / Essentials / Variables and data types essentials / Numbers

Integer numbers

The Int data type represents integer numbers. Numbers can be positive and negative, and you can use an explicit + sign if you want to. Here are a few obvious examples:

42
-42
100
-5
0

Yes, a bare 0 is considered an integer by default.

Groups of digits

Raku has a cute feature that lets you spell big numbers with some visual helpers that split the digits into groups of thousands:

1_000_000
-3_141_592

Although you can construct a number such as 34_56, you’d better avoid it as this may confuse other people reading your code. But you cannot have two adjacent underscores, nor can you start or end the number with it.

Arbitrary long integers

Raku perfectly handles the numbers beyond the 32- or 64-bit limits. For example, the following program is an acceptable program that multiplies two big integer numbers and prints the correct result.

say 1_234_456_789_012_345_678_901 * 987_654_321_098_765_432_100;

Course navigation

← Numbers   |   Quiz: Integer numbers →

💪 Or jump directly to the exercises in this section.