Perl Debugged

12.1. Tips for Everyman

You need to make certain adjustments when coming to Perl from more familiar languages:

• Variables begin with type-specifying punctuation characters^[1] referred to by some as sigils. It's not quite the revenge of Hungarian notation—no mblock *apmblkMessages[] here, thank goodness. The hardest thing for a Perl beginner to assimilate is that while, for example, @animals is the name of an array, $animals[14] is the name of a particular element in it, and @animals[2..7] is the name of a slice of that array. Just remember the rule that when you're referring to exactly one thing, it's a scalar and therefore begins with a $, whereas multiple things are an array—sort of—and begin with an @ sign.

  ^[1] Well, most of them. Filehandles ...