Hello World in Perl

The Script

Always best to dive in with an example, I think!  So, here's the bog-standard HelloWorld program in Perl:

# This program print Hello World!
print 'Hello World!';

Exciting, huh?  Now, if you save this as HelloWorld.pl, then you can type 

perl -w HelloWorld.pl 

to compile and execute it (for Active Perl anyway).

Analysis

There are only really 3 points to make about this script:

• Comments start with a #, and take the rest of the line

• print outputs to the STDOUT stream (your DOS window, probably), and there's no CR/LF appended to the end.

• Lines that aren't comments end with a ";"

So, with that over and done with, we can get on with learning Perl..

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Page Last Updated on Wednesday September 04, 2002