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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:
A hash variable is typically marked by a % sigil, to visually distinguish it from scalar, array, and other data types, and to define its behaviour towards iteration. A hash literal is a key-value list, with the preferred form using Perl's => token, which makes the key-value association clearer:
The loop control keywords are treated as expressions in Perl, not as statements like in C or Java. The next keyword jumps directly to the end of the current iteration of the loop. This usually causes the next iteration of the loop to be started, but the continue block and loop condition are evaluated first.
^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.
The end-loop marker specifies the name of the index variable, which must correspond to the name of the index variable at the start of the for-loop. Some languages (PL/I, Fortran 95, and later) allow a statement label at the start of a for-loop that can be matched by the compiler against the same text on the corresponding end-loop statement.
Folds can be regarded as consistently replacing the structural components of a data structure with functions and values. Lists, for example, are built up in many functional languages from two primitives: any list is either an empty list, commonly called nil ([]), or is constructed by prefixing an element in front of another list, creating what is called a cons node ( Cons(X1,Cons(X2,Cons ...
The empty hash {} is also true; in this context {} is not an empty block, because perl -e 'print ref {}' returns HASH. Evaluated boolean expressions are also scalar values. The documentation does not promise which particular value of true or false is returned. Many boolean operators return 1 for true and the empty-string for false.
Specifically, the for loop will call a value's into_iter() method, which returns an iterator that in turn yields the elements to the loop. The for loop (or indeed, any method that consumes the iterator), proceeds until the next() method returns a None value (iterations yielding elements return a Some(T) value, where T is the element type).