Basic Syntax

Here's some information that applies to all of perl.

Perl is free form - whitespace doesn't matter. Most people like to use liberal indentation, but you could write all on one line, if you're a masochist.
All perl statements end in a ; (semicolon), like C.
Comments
- begin with # (pound sign)
- everything after the #, and up to the end of the line is ignored.
- the # needn't be at the beginning of the line.
- There is no way to comment out blocks of code other than putting a # at the beginning of each line. It's a convention taken from the shell utilities, sorry C folks.

Example

Now our program looks like this:

 
        #!/usr/local/bin/perl 
        # mailform - a simple CGI program to email the contents of an HTML 
        #  form to a specified user. 
	# 
        # Ben Johnson 
        # [email protected] 
        # September, 1995

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

[email protected]

Basic Syntax

Example

Last modified: June 19, 1997