> For the complete documentation index, see [llms.txt](https://trizen.gitbook.io/perl6-rosettacode/llms.txt). Markdown versions of documentation pages are available by appending `.md` to page URLs; this page is available as [Markdown](https://trizen.gitbook.io/perl6-rosettacode/programming_tasks/f/forward_difference.md).

# Forward difference

Here we use signature matching to bind both an entire array and a version missing the head. The Z- operator is a zip metaoperator with a minus to subtract the two lists pairwise. It's almost a shame to define difn, since the series and subscript are hardly longer than the call itself would be, and arguably more self-documenting than the name of the function would be.

```perl
sub dif(@array [$, *@tail]) { @tail Z- @array }
sub difn($array, $n) { ($array, &dif ... *)[$n] }
```
