Can I forward to declare a Perl 6 class, which I will define later?

Question

Is it possible to forward the declaration of the class that I want to load and use later, without interpolating its name? I am trying something like this:

my class Digest::MD5 {};
require ::('Digest::MD5');
put Digest::MD.new.md5_hex("My awesome data to hash");

I know I can do this with interpolation, but I was hoping to skip this step:

require ::('Digest::MD5');
put ::('Digest::MD5').new.md5_hex("My awesome data to hash");

It seemed to me that I saw something similar in some basic classes, but perhaps they had additional material.

Answer 1

Divide the question:

• Can I forward a class declaration?

  , .
  ( Rakudo )
  , , .

  class Foo {...}
  class Foo {
  }
  

• ::('Digest::MD5') ?

  require -

  put (require Digest::MD5).new.md5_hex("My awesome data to hash");
  

  :

  sub term:<Digest::MD5> () { once require Digest::MD5 }
  
  put Digest::MD5.new.md5_hex("My awesome data to hash");