Gabor Szabo Perl Trainer and developer

One of the 3 things use strict disables is the use of symbolic references.

Let's see how can that save you time and avoid embarrassment!

Let's see why avoiding symbolic referrences is a good thing!

At another time we'll see a useful example of symbolic references.

After 4 years of silence the Perl Workshop in Israel will take place on 28 February 2012. The web site is open for registration.

Talks can be given in either English or Hebrew. The dead-line to submit talk proposals is 20 December 2011.

The event is going to be free of charge but requires registration.

use strict has 3 parts. One of them, also called use strict "subs" disables the inappropriate use of barewords.

What does that mean?

Without this restriction code like this would work and print "hello".


  my $x = hello;
  print "$x\n";    # hello

That's strange in itself as we are used to put strings in quotes but Perl allows "barewords" - words without quotes - to behave like strings.

Since I started my Perl Tutorial series a couple of people commented on what and how I am teaching.

Some people asked why did I show "open or die" and why not using autodie. Others recommended the use IO::All instead of open.

In this episode of the Perl tutorial we are going to look at context sensitivity in Perl.

In English, as in most of the other languages, words can have multiple meanings. For example the word "left" has several meanings:

I left the building.