At YAPC::NA::2015, I attended the Perl 6 Beginners Class. I am happy to see
that Perl 6 is settling down into apparently having a more settled spec (for
some value of spec), and is, with its impending release, something I'll want
to at least play with.

That said, the docs are far from complete, and there are certainly
questions someone coming from Perl 5 will have that the Perl 5 to Perl 6
Translation document does not clearly answer.

Examples:

 a) While trying to port the Test-Simple package to Perl 6, I
    encountered this bit of code: "my (undef, $file, $line) = caller();"
    I made the mistake of starting at the beginning, and wondering what
    I should replace "undef" with. My first thought was "Nil", but a bit
    of poking on #perl6 on freenode informed me that undef would most
    likely be <Any> in Perl 6. Upon further investigation, I found that
    "caller()" itself is gone, essentially replaced by "callframe()".
    So, what this *really* turns into in Perl 6 is "my ($file, $line) =
    callframe().annotations<file line>". The problem here is that
    "callframe()" *isn't documented* in the online Perl 6 language
    documentation. One can also call "callframe().my" which gives...
    something that may or may not be an analog of the package name
    formerly returned either as the first item given by "caller()" or by
    using that call in scalar context.

 b) A number of files in Test-Simple look for what version of Perl you
    are using, found in Perl 5 in the "$]" variable. This made me go
    looking for the equivalent in Perl 6. This would seem to be the
    "$*PERL" variable, but that gives us "Perl 6", which is not really
    what we're looking for. What we *are* looking for seems to be in
    "$*PERL.version" (although at this point in Perl 6 development, that
    gives us "vunknown" which is... again, not useful).


So, what this leads me to is that what would be *hugely* useful for people
transitioning from Perl 5 to Perl 6 is a much more comprehensive text
than what currently exists as the Perl 5 to Perl 6 Translation document.

With that in mind, I'm going to start here with two initial goals:

 1) Map Perl 5's special variables to their Perl 6 equivalents (or, of
    course, note where there is no direct analog)

 2) Describe how to translate the core Perl 5 functions to their Perl 6
    equivalents (or, similarly to the variables, punt if necessary).

As a cursory check shows there to be something like 4-500 built-in functions
(don't quote me on that, I'm just grepping for "=item" in perlfunc....), this
could take a while. But hopefully, all that work will be of use to someone.
More hopefully, a lot of someones.

So here goes. Wish me luck.