Footnotes
Female pronouns are used throughout this book. It can be
assumed that they refer to both genders.
Actually, it cannot be longer than your computer has
virtual memory, but that is rarely a problem.
C
programmers are already probably used to this idea.
There are also standard packages available
to handle very large and very small numbers, and packages to force use of
integers only for all calculations.
Language historians may notice that this is a
feature from the Ada language.
The ' character is a synonym for :: which
is used for packages, a topic not covered in this text.
Some operators are not associative at all (see section 2.7 Summary of Scalar Operators).
It is possible to make
an array of arrays using a concept called "references", but that topic
is beyond the scope of this book.
For another way to do this, see the exercises in this
section.
Perl will eventually support
unicode, or some other extended character format, in which case it will
no longer merely be ASCII characters.
Actually, Perl regular expressions have a
few additional features that go beyond the traditional, simple set of
regular expressions, but these are an advanced topic.
Perl
has also been given the name, Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister.
Choose the one with which you feel more comfortable. Some even insist
that Perl is no longer an acronym for anything. This argument has
merit, since Perl is never written PERL.
