There are many ways to store data in a variable. For now we will focus on the below example:

$my_name = 'Hamburglar; ' # places the name Hamburglar in the variable

$my_iq = 1000; # places the value 1,000 in the variable

You'll note the # symbol followed by text above. This is known as a comment. Comments are lines of text that the computer cannot see. They are used to let other programmers (and even yourself) know what you intended a line of code to do. When the computer sees the # symbol, it skips the remainder of that line and moves on to the next.

Try the following code:

#!/usr/local/bin/perl

$my_name = 'James';

print "My name is below:n";

print "$my_namen";

The above code will print out the following to your screen:

  My name is below:

  James

You will notice a few new additions to our code. The first is the line:

#!/usr/local/bin/perl

This must appear on the first line of every program you create. It tells the computer which directory to look in.

In addition, we added the print command, which tells the program to print something to the screen. And lastly, we added the n or new line code. This simply informs the program to go to the next line and not print the next line of text on the same line.