Chapter 7. Formats
Perl has a mechanism to help you generate simple reports
and charts. To facilitate this, Perl helps you code up your output page
close to how it will look when it's printed. It can keep track of things
like how many lines are on a page, the current page number, when to
print page headers, and so on. Keywords are borrowed from FORTRAN:
format to declare and write to
execute; see the relevant entries in Chapter 29. Fortunately, the layout is
much more legible, more like the PRINT USING
statement of BASIC. Think of it as a poor man's
nroff (1). (If you know
nroff, that may not sound like a
recommendation.)
Formats, like packages and subroutines, are declared
rather than executed, so they may occur at any point in your program.
(Usually it's best to keep them all together.) They have their own
namespace apart from all the other types in Perl. This means that if you
have a function named "Foo", it is not the same thing
as a format named "Foo". However, the default name
for the format associated with a given filehandle is the same as the
name of that filehandle. Thus, the default format for
STDOUT is named "STDOUT", and the
default format for filehandle TEMP is named
"TEMP". They just look the same. They aren't.
Output record formats are declared as follows:
formatNAME=FORMLIST.
If NAME is omitted, format
STDOUT is defined.
FORMLIST consists of a sequence of lines,
each of which may be of one of three types:
A comment, indicated by putting a
#in the first column. ...
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