Programming Perl, 4th Edition

Operators

As we alluded to earlier, Perl is also a mathematical language. This is true at several levels, from low-level bitwise logical operations, up through number and set manipulation, on up to larger predicates and abstractions of various sorts. And as we all know from studying math in school, mathematicians love strange symbols. What’s worse, computer scientists have come up with their own versions of these strange symbols. Perl has a number of these strange symbols, too—but take heart, as most are borrowed directly from C, FORTRAN, sed(1) or awk(1), so they’ll at least be familiar to users of those languages.

The rest of you can take comfort in knowing that, by learning all these strange symbols in Perl, you’ve given yourself a head start on all those other strange languages.

Perl’s built-in operators may be classified by number of operands into unary, binary, and trinary (or ternary) operators. They may be classified by whether they’re prefix operators (which go in front of their operands) or infix operators (which go in between their operands). They may also be classified by the kinds of objects they work with, such as numbers, strings, or files. Later, we’ll give you a table of all the operators, but first here are some handy ones to get you started.