Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Diagram of the mechanism of using perl modules. A Perl module is a discrete component of software for the Perl programming language.Technically, it is a particular set of conventions for using Perl's package mechanism that has become universally adopted.
Originally, filehandles could only be created with package variables, using the ALL_CAPS convention to distinguish it from other variables. Perl 5.6 and newer also accept a scalar variable, which will be set (autovivified) to a reference to an anonymous filehandle, in place of a named filehandle.
Such programs are called "scripts". In this regard, perl is considered to be a scripting language. Typical operations performed by shell scripts include program execution, printing text, and file manipulation (copying, renaming, deleting, etc.). Being an interpreted language, perl has the following advantages: Platform independence
In Perl, foreach (which is equivalent to the shorter for) can be used to traverse elements of a list. The expression which denotes the collection to loop over is evaluated in list-context and each item of the resulting list is, in turn, aliased to the loop variable. List literal example:
^c In Perl, the "my" keyword scopes the variable into the block. ^d Technically, this does not declare name to be a mutable variable—in ML, all names can only be bound once; rather, it declares name to point to a "reference" data structure, which is a simple mutable cell.
Perl 5.6.1 and newer support autovivification of file and directory handles. [3] Calling open() on an undefined variable will set it to a filehandle. According to perl561delta, "[t]his largely eliminates the need for typeglobs when opening filehandles that must be passed around, as in the following example:
Perl provides three loop control keywords that all accept an optional loop label as an argument. If no label is specified, the keywords act on the innermost loop. Within nested loops, the use of labels enables control to move from an inner loop to an outer one, or out of the outer loop altogether.
Scripts such as pyp or Pyline import commonly used modules and provide more human-readable variables in an attempt to make Python functionality more accessible on the command line. Here is a redo of the above example (printing the last field of a unix long listing):