Hello Mark,
> am new to Perl. I'm followig this tutorial,
>
> http://www.cs.unc.edu/~jbs/resources/perl/perl-basics/variables.html
>
> and am confused as to why the below shows examples with $ and
> some with % at the beginning of the statement. When it says,
> "Perl uses the "percent" symbol and curly braces with respect
> to the name of an associative array as a whole". Am I to
> assume that either is fine, when defining associative arrays.? Cheers.
$, @, % and & are called sigils. They preceed variable names.
Together they make a variable. A statement can involve variables,
but doesn't need to do so. Think of a statement as a sentence, and
of variables as a word, then you shuld get the idea ;-)
As for terminology, people often say hash when they mean associative
array.
The sigils denote the type of data you're accessing. So you say
%hash when you mean the whole hash, but $hash{'key'} to access an
individual value in the hash. Likewise, it's @array for a complete
array, but $array[$index] for an element. Note that it's also
legal to say @array[$index1, $index2, $index3] to access several
elements of the array at once.
Things become more confusing when you consider this:
my $badidea; # I am a scalar
my %badidea; # I am a hash
Perl is perfectly willing and able to deal with variables of the same
name when they have different types. It's only people who are confused
by this ;-)
So the sigil does make a difference when defining your variables.
Ganbatte, ne? ;-)
HTH,
Thomas
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