Controlling the order of evaluation
With what you've seen this far, you might have got the impression that Puppet's DSL is a specialized scripting language. That is actually quite far from the truth—a manifest is not a script or program. The language is a tool to model a system state through a set of resources, including files, packages, and cron jobs, among others.
The whole paradigm is different from that of scripting languages. Ruby or Perl are imperative languages that are based around statements that will be evaluated in a strict order. The Puppet DSL is declarative, which means that the manifest declares a set of resources that are expected to have certain properties. These resources are put into a catalog, and Puppet then tries to build ...
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