Course of Raku / Essentials / Basic introduction to Raku and its compiler / Simple input and output

Input with prompt

The opposite of say is prompt. It waits until the user enters something and presses Enter. Then, it sends the input to the program as a string. You can take the result of prompt and pass it to say. In this case, you echo what the user types. Let us create such a program:

say prompt;

If you run this program, you may be confused as the program enters the state, in which it only waits for any input. To make the program more user-friendly, it is good to print the prompt message. You don’t need to add a separate say, because you can pass the message to prompt:

prompt 'What language are you going to learn? '

Before wrapping up this section, let us combine all the pieces and create a program that asks about the user’s wishes and then prints a phrase using the text that the user entered.

say 'You are going to learn ', prompt 'What language are you going to learn? ';

If you entered Raku, you get the following phrase printed:

You are going to learn Raku

Ok, we can now talk to the program, and we can make the program talk to us!

Note that as say needs to know the strings before printing them, Raku will first execute prompt, so the dialogue goes in the correct order:

$ raku t.raku 
What language are you going to learn? Raku
You are going to learn Raku

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