Re: PERL, PDF and religious wars was Re: [LUG] Development (thismight be long!)

[James Keasley <jamesk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Adrian Midgley <amidgley2@xxxxxxxxxx> writes:

> On Mon, 2005-03-21 at 20:51, Aaron Trevena wrote:
>
> > Also the sigils clarify things a great deal. They take some getting
> > used to but the reward is huge.
>
> sigils?

Yeah, perl uses symbols to denote certain things, which clears things up 
when you know what they mean, most usually as prefixes to variables.

You may have seen php with variables like $foo and $bar = array();
these came from Perl, but php uses $ for everything.

In Perl $ indicates that something is being used in a scalar
context, ie $foo = "bar", or $foo[0] = "bar", or even $foo{baz} = "bar".

while the sigils @ and % denote that the variable is an array or
associative array, being used in list context.

things get a bit more complex when you start using references (kind
of sort of like pointers), and an awful lot of expressiveness is
packed into punctuation, and there is also a load of implicit
shortcuts that save you time at the expense of readability,
such as the idiomatic foreach loop:-

@foo = (1 .. 10);

foreach (@foo) {
 print $_, "\n";
}



-- 
James                                   jamesk[at]homeric[dot]co[dot]uk

Most soapbar comes from f--king Holland, it's made from oil and tyres and 
pollen - Goldie Lookin' Chain "Soapbar"

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