I’ve been delving into the Perl language more lately for a job, and have found out some interesting things about it. Perl itself is a bit shrouded in mysticism, with it often being said that it runs on “magic”. The original Perl engine, written by Larry Wall, has never been duplicated due to its incredible complexity and hacked together nature.

One funny little thing I noticed is that an arrow “=>” and comma “,” are completely synonymous in the language. For example, this is how you SHOULD declare a hash and an array, because it just looks better and is proper coding standards:

@MyArray=('a',1,'b',2); #An array with values a,1,b,2
%MyHash=(a=>1, b=>2); #A hash with keys a,b that contain the values 1,2

but you can actually declare the exact same array and hash objects like this

@MyArray=('a'=>1=>'b'=>2); #An array with values a,1,b,2
%MyHash=(a,1,b,2); #A hash with keys a,b that contain the values 1,2

It’s also easy to find the length of a non referenced array in Perl as follows:

print $#MyArray; #Index of the last element, so add 1 to get length

or

$ArrayLength=@MyArray;
print $ArrayLength;

There are two ways to do it with a referenced array:

$MyRefArray=[1,2,3];
print scalar @$MyRefArray;
print $#$MyRefArray; #Index of the last element, so add 1 to get length

Moral of the story: there are many ways to do things in Perl.

After now having delved a bit more into how Perl works, I still like PHP better as a strictly quick scripting language. Oh well.