Perl 101 (Part 2) - Of Variables And Operators

In the first part of this tutorial, we introduced you to the basics of Perl, Austin Powers-style. This week, we're going to get down and dirty with variables and operators, and also provide you with a brief introduction to Perl's conditional expressions.

To begin with, let's answer a very basic question for all those of you unfamiliar with programming jargon: what's a variable when it's at home?

A variable is the fundamental building block of any programming languages. Think of a variable as a container which can be used to store data; this data is used in different places in your Perl program. A variable can store both numeric and non-numeric data, and the contents of a variable can be altered during program execution. Finally, variables can be compared with each other, and you - the programmer - can write program code that performs specific actions on the basis of this comparison.

Every language has different types of variables - however, for the moment, we're going to concentrate on the simplest type, referred to in Perl as "scalar variables". A scalar variable can hold any type of value - integer, text string, floating-point number - and is usually preceded by a dollar sign.

The manner in which scalar variables are assigned values should be clear from the following example:

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#!/usr/bin/perl
# a simple scalar variable
$name = "mud";
# and an example of how to use it
print ("My name is ", $name);

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And here's what the output of that program looks like:

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My name is mud

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Really?! We feel for you...

It shouldn't be too hard to see what happened here - the scalar variable $name was assigned the text value "mud", and this value was then printed to the console via the print() statement.

Although assigning values to a scalar variable is extremely simple - as you've just seen - there are a few things that you should keep in mind here:

• A scalar variable name must be preceded by a dollar [$] sign - for example, $name, $id and the like. This helps differentiate between scalar variables and arrays or hashes, which are the other types of variables supported by Perl.
• Every scalar variable name must begin with a letter, optionally followed by more letters or numbers - for example, $a, $data123, $i_am_god
• The maximum length of a scalar variable name is 255 characters; however, if you use a name that long, you need therapy!
• Case is important when referring to scalar variables - in Perl, a $cigar is definitely not a $CIGAR!
• It's always a good idea to give your variables names that make sense and are immediately recognizable - it's easy to tell what $gross_income refers to, but not that easy to identify $ginc.
• Unlike other programming languages, a scalar variable in Perl can store both integers and floating-point numbers [also known as decimals]. This added flexibility is just one of the many nice things about Perl.

Here's another program, this one illustrating how variables can be used to store and manipulate numbers.

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#!/usr/bin/perl
# declare a variable
$number = 19;
print ($number, " times 1 is ", $number,"\n");
print ($number, " times 2 is ", $number * 2, "\n");
print ($number, " times 3 is ", $number * 3, "\n");
print ($number, " times 4 is ", $number * 4, "\n");
print ($number, " times 5 is ", $number * 5, "\n");

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And here's what the output looks like:

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19 times 1 is 19
19 times 2 is 38
19 times 3 is 57
19 times 4 is 76
19 times 5 is 95

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>>> More Perl Programming Articles          >>> More By Vikram Vaswani and Harish Kamath, (c) Melonfire

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