Programming PERL in the .NET Environment

Format of Perl Modules

Recall that a Perl module is a .pm file that contains a package statement together with some other items, including documentation. Perl documentation is typically called POD (Plain Old Documentation). Before we present the categories of modules found on CPAN, we discuss what you can expect to find in any of the CPAN modules that you might download.

Building a Module

To illustrate the different pieces of information that you may find in any module, we will build one of our own. The first step is to create a .pm file. All .pm files need to have the package specifier as the first line of the file. The name of the file and the name of the package need to be the same (except for the suffix .pm).

Suppose we wish to build a package ...