Perl 6 Deep Dive

Sigils

One of the most difficult things for the newcomers to Perl are sigils. A sigil is a character in front of the name of variables in Perl that denotes the structural type of a variable. For example, $ for scalar values, @ for arrays, and % for hashes.

The problem arises when you access an element of an array or hash. Let's consider the following lines of code as an example in Perl 5 of an array with the first few Fibonacci numbers:

my @fibonacci = (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13);
print $fibonacci[4];

First, a @fibonacci array is created. The name of the variable includes the @ character as a sigil. In the second line, we access one of the elements of that array and use another sigil, $, this time. This is because a single element of an array ...