The Unless Statement - Perl

While Perl truly is the programming language of the slacker, the bored, and the (okay I'll say it with great lamentation) creative, it is also a harsh mistress. But let's face it: as a computer programmer, you are luck to have a mistress at all. So chin up. Perl doesn't just freely give you love. There are conditions, or, more precisely, conditionals, which is the topic of this fourth part in a series.

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By: James Payne

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October 16, 2007

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The Unless Statement is the opposite of the If statement in that it asks if a condition is false, and executes the code unless the condition is true.

#!/usr/bin/perl

$my_iq = 1000;

$your_iq = 90;

unless ($your_iq > $my_iq)

{

print "My brain is enormous and far superior to your own!";

}

In the above code, the program will print out the sentence: "My brain is enormous and far superior to your own!" every time, unless $you_iq is greater than $my_iq.

Getting Loopy

Near the end of the day I always get a little loopy; I can't think straight and words just come out wrong. But I'm getting off topic here. Loops in code are something completely different.

The purpose of a loop is to loop a piece of code so that you don't have to type it over a billion times. Let's take a look at the For Loop:

#!/usr/bin/perl

for ($count =1; $count<10; $count++)

{

print "I R THE GREATEST!n";

}

The above code created a variable name $count and assigned an initial value of 1. It also has a part that tells it to increment the value of $count by +1 ($greatness++) and to do so until the value of $count is 10 or greater ($count<10). So long as the value of $count is less than 10, the following will print to the screen:

I R THE GREATEST!

If we were working with numbers we could have also just assigned a numeric value to $count and have it do this:

#!/usr/bin/perl

for ($count =1; $count<10; $count++)

{

print "$countn";

}

That would print out the following to your screen:

The For Loop loops for the number of times you tell it to.

Next: The While Loop >>