Perl 5 Semantics

Introduction

This is a short overview of the exact semantics of Perl 5 variables and values, and phenomena such as aliasing. I assume you already have basic Perl knowledge, and know what concepts such as "reference" and "scope" mean.

Note that this is not a tutorial about perl internals: I describe concepts in a way that explains the behaviour visible to the Perl programmer, regardless of whether this matches their actual implementation.

All examples assume you run perl with the -l option.

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