Chapter 1. An Overview of Perl
Getting Started
We think that Perl is an easy language to learn and use, and we hope to convince you that we're right. One thing that's easy about Perl is that you don't have to say much before you say what you want to say. In many programming languages, you have to declare the types, variables, and subroutines you are going to use before you can write the first statement of executable code. And for complex problems demanding complex data structures, declarations are a good idea. But for many simple, everyday problems, you'd like a programming language in which you can simply say:
print "Howdy, world!\n";
and expect the program to do just that.
Perl is such a language. In fact, this example is a complete
program,[1] and if you feed it to the Perl interpreter, it will
print "Howdy, world!" on your screen. (The
\n in the example produces a newline at the end of
the output.)
And that's that. You don't have to say much
after you say what you want to say, either.
Unlike many languages, Perl thinks that falling off the end of your
program is just a normal way to exit the program. You certainly
may call the exit function
explicitly if you wish, just as you may declare
some of your variables, or even force yourself to
declare all your variables. But it's your choice. With Perl you're
free to do The Right Thing, however you care to define it.
There are many other reasons why Perl is easy to use, but it would be pointless to list them all here, because that's ...