/* */ C-style comments, it will be interpreted
either as division or pattern matching, depending on the context, and C++
// comments just look like a null regular expression, so don't do
that.
A declaration can be put anywhere a statement can, but has no effect on the execution of the primary sequence of statements--declarations all take effect at compile time. Typically all the declarations are put at the beginning or the end of the script. However, if you're using lexically-scoped private variables created with my(), you'll have to make sure your format or subroutine definition is within the same block scope as the my if you expect to to be able to access those private variables.
Declaring a subroutine allows a subroutine name to be used as if it were a list operator from that point forward in the program. You can declare a subroutine (prototyped to take one scalar parameter) without defining it by saying just:
Note that it functions as a list operator though, not as a unary
operator, so be careful to use or instead of || there.
Subroutines declarations can also be loaded up with the require statement
or both loaded and imported into your namespace with a use statement.
See the perlmod manpage
for details on this.
A statement sequence may contain declarations of lexically-scoped variables, but apart from declaring a variable name, the declaration acts like an ordinary statement, and is elaborated within the sequence of statements as if it were an ordinary statement. That means it actually has both compile-time and run-time effects.
eval {} and do {} that look
like compound statements, but aren't (they're just TERMs in an expression),
and thus need an explicit termination if used as the last item in a statement.
Any simple statement may optionally be followed by a SINGLE modifier, just before the terminating semicolon (or block ending). The possible modifiers are:
The if and unless modifiers have the expected semantics,
presuming you're a speaker of English. The while and until
modifiers also have the usual ``while loop'' semantics (conditional
evaluated first), except when applied to a do-BLOCK (or to the
now-deprecated do-SUBROUTINE statement), in which case the block
executes once before the conditional is evaluated. This is so that you
can write loops like:
See do. Note also that the loop control statements described later will NOT work in this construct, since modifiers don't take loop labels. Sorry. You can always wrap another block around it to do that sort of thing.
But generally, a block is delimited by curly brackets, also known as braces. We will call this syntactic construct a BLOCK.
The following compound statements may be used to control flow:
Note that, unlike C and Pascal, these are defined in terms of BLOCKs, not statements. This means that the curly brackets are required--no dangling statements allowed. If you want to write conditionals without curly brackets there are several other ways to do it. The following all do the same thing:
The if statement is straightforward. Since BLOCKs are always
bounded by curly brackets, there is never any ambiguity about which
if an else goes with. If you use unless in place of if,
the sense of the test is reversed.
The while statement executes the block as long as the expression is
true (does not evaluate to the null string or 0 or ``0''). The LABEL is
optional, and if present, consists of an identifier followed by a colon.
The LABEL identifies the loop for the loop control statements next,
last, and redo. If the LABEL is omitted, the loop control statement
refers to the innermost enclosing loop. This may include dynamically
looking back your call-stack at run time to find the LABEL. Such
desperate behavior triggers a warning if you use the -w flag.
If there is a continue BLOCK, it is always executed just before the
conditional is about to be evaluated again, just like the third part of a
for loop in C. Thus it can be used to increment a loop variable, even
when the loop has been continued via the next statement (which is
similar to the C continue statement).
next command is like the continue statement in C; it starts
the next iteration of the loop:
The last command is like the break statement in C (as used in
loops); it immediately exits the loop in question. The
continue block, if any, is not executed:
The redo command restarts the loop block without evaluating the
conditional again. The continue block, if any, is not executed.
This command is normally used by programs that want to lie to themselves
about what was just input.
For example, when processing a file like /etc/termcap. If your input lines might end in backslashes to indicate continuation, you want to skip ahead and get the next record.
which is Perl short-hand for the more explicitly written version:
Or here's a simpleminded Pascal comment stripper (warning: assumes no { or } in strings).
Note that if there were a continue block on the above code, it would get
executed even on discarded lines.
If the word while is replaced by the word until, the sense of the
test is reversed, but the conditional is still tested before the first
iteration.
In either the if or the while statement, you may replace ``(EXPR)''
with a BLOCK, and the conditional is true if the value of the last
statement in that block is true. While this ``feature'' continues to work in
version 5, it has been deprecated, so please change any occurrences of ``if BLOCK'' to
``if (do BLOCK)''.
for loop works exactly like the corresponding while loop;
that means that this:
is the same as this:
Besides the normal array index looping, for can lend itself
to many other interesting applications. Here's one that avoids the
problem you get into if you explicitly test for end-of-file on
an interactive file descriptor causing your program to appear to
hang.
foreach loop iterates over a normal list value and sets the
variable VAR to be each element of the list in turn. The variable is
implicitly local to the loop and regains its former value upon exiting the
loop. If the variable was previously declared with my, it uses that
variable instead of the global one, but it's still localized to the loop.
This can cause problems if you have subroutine or format declarations
within that block's scope.
The foreach keyword is actually a synonym for the for keyword, so
you can use foreach for readability or for for brevity. If VAR is
omitted, $_ is set to each value. If LIST is an actual array (as opposed
to an expression returning a list value), you can modify each element of
the array by modifying VAR inside the loop. That's because the foreach
loop index variable is an implicit alias for each item in the list that
you're looping over.
Examples:
Here's how a C programmer might code up a particular algorithm in Perl:
Whereas here's how a Perl programmer more comfortable with the idiom might do it:
See how much easier this is? It's cleaner, safer, and faster. It's
cleaner because it's less noisy. It's safer because if code gets added
between the inner and outer loops later on, the new code won't be
accidentally executed, the next explicitly iterates the other loop
rather than merely terminating the inner one. And it's faster because
Perl executes a foreach statement more rapidly than it would the
equivalent for loop.
eval{}, sub{}, or contrary to popular belief do{} blocks,
which do NOT count as loops.) The continue block
is optional.
The BLOCK construct is particularly nice for doing case structures.
There is no official switch statement in Perl, because there are already several ways to write the equivalent. In addition to the above, you could write
(That's actually not as strange as it looks once you realize that you can use loop control ``operators'' within an expression, That's just the normal C comma operator.)
or
or formatted so it stands out more as a ``proper'' switch statement:
or
or even, horrors,
A common idiom for a switch statement is to use foreach's aliasing to make
a temporary assignment to $_ for convenient matching:
Another interesting approach to a switch statement is arrange
for a do block to return the proper value:
goto statement.
A loop's LABEL is not actually a valid target for a goto;
it's just the name of the loop. There are three forms: goto-LABEL,
goto-EXPR, and goto-&NAME.
The goto-LABEL form finds the statement labeled with LABEL and resumes execution there. It may not be used to go into any construct that requires initialization, such as a subroutine or a foreach loop. It also can't be used to go into a construct that is optimized away. It can be used to go almost anywhere else within the dynamic scope, including out of subroutines, but it's usually better to use some other construct such as last or die. The author of Perl has never felt the need to use this form of goto (in Perl, that is--C is another matter).
The goto-EXPR form expects a label name, whose scope will be resolved dynamically. This allows for computed gotos per FORTRAN, but isn't necessarily recommended if you're optimizing for maintainability:
The goto-&NAME form is highly magical, and substitutes a call to the
named subroutine for the currently running subroutine. This is used by
AUTOLOAD() subroutines that wish to load another subroutine and then
pretend that the other subroutine had been called in the first place
(except that any modifications to @_ in the current subroutine are
propagated to the other subroutine.) After the goto, not even caller()
will be able to tell that this routine was called first.
In almost all cases like this, it's usually a far, far better idea to use the
structured control flow mechanisms of next, last, or redo instead of
resorting to a goto. For certain applications, the catch and throw pair of
eval{} and die() for exception processing can also be a prudent approach.
Then that text and all remaining text up through and including a line
beginning with =cut will be ignored. The format of the intervening
text is described in the perlpod manpage
.
This allows you to intermix your source code and your documentation text freely, as in
Note that pod translators should only look at paragraphs beginning with a pod directive (it makes parsing easier), whereas the compiler actually knows to look for pod escapes even in the middle of a paragraph. This means that the following secret stuff will be ignored by both the compiler and the translators.
You probably shouldn't rely upon the warn() being podded out forever. Not all pod translators are well-behaved in this regard, and perhaps the compiler will become pickier.