Minimal Perl

Chapter 7. Built-in functions

7.1	Understanding and managing evaluation context	206
7.2	Programming with functions that generate or process scalars	210
7.3	Programming with functions that process lists	223
7.4	Globbing for filenames	234
7.5	Managing files with functions	239
7.6	Parenthesizing function arguments	242
7.7	Summary	243

One of the properties of a programming language that makes it easy and gratifying to use, or the opposite, is the collection of built-in functions it provides. Perl has literally hundreds of these, including the relatively mundane ones called print, printf, warn, and die that you encountered in part 1. But Perl has much more advanced functions as well, such as one that provides the basic infrastructure for implementing arbitrary data transformations, ...