Picking Up Perl

A Tutorial Book for New Perl Programmers

0.12th Edition, Covering Perl Version 5.6.0

Feedback and comments are always welcome. Send them to pup-comments@ebb.org

January 2001

Bradley M. Kuhn


(1)

Female pronouns are used throughout this book. It can be assumed that they refer to both genders.

(2)

Actually, it cannot be longer than your computer has virtual memory, but that is rarely a problem.

(3)

C programmers are already probably used to this idea.

(4)

There are also standard packages available to handle very large and very small numbers, and packages to force use of integers only for all calculations.

(5)

Language historians may notice that this is a feature from the Ada language.

(6)

The ' character is a synonym for :: which is used for packages, a topic not covered in this text.

(7)

Some operators are not associative at all (see section Summary of Scalar Operators).

(8)

It is possible to make an array of arrays using a concept called "references", but that topic is beyond the scope of this book.

(9)

For another way to do this, see the exercises in this section.

(10)

Perl will eventually support unicode, or some other extended character format, in which case it will no longer merely be @acronym{ASCII

(11)

Actually, Perl regular expressions have a few additional features that go beyond the traditional, simple set of regular expressions, but these are an advanced topic.

(12)

Perl has also been given the name, Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister. Choose the one with which you feel more comfortable. Some even insist that Perl is no longer an acronym for anything. This argument has merit, since Perl is never written PERL.


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