use Perl

Reading the first two paragraphs of perlsyn, I've noticed there is more information in there about sed, awk, C and command line switches than introductory perl syntax.

A Perl script consists of a sequence of declarations and statements. The sequence of statements is executed just once, unlike in sed and awk scripts, where the sequence of statements is executed for each input line. While this means that you must explicitly loop over the lines of your input file (or files), it also means you have much more control over which files and which lines you look at. (Actually, I'm lying--it is possible to do an implicit loop with either the -n or -p switch. It's just not the mandatory default like it is in sed and awk.)

Perl is, for the most part, a free-form language. (The only exception to this is format declarations, for obvious reasons.) Text from a "#" character until the end of the line is a comment, and is ignored. If you attempt to use /* */ C-style comments, it will be interpreted either as division or pattern matching, depending on the context, and C++ // comments just look like a null regular expression or defined-or operator, so don't do that.

What is this actually teaching?

• A Perl script consists of declarations and statements executed once no matter what the input.
• Sed and awk execute once for every line of input.
• Perl has -n and -p switches to act more like sed and awk
• Perl comments start with #
• C comments look like /* */
• C++ comments look like //
• // is either a division or null regular expression or defined-or in Perl

This quantifies like so:

• 2 facts about basic Perl syntax
• 2 facts about advanced Perl features
• 3 facts about other languages/tools

Obviously a hold over from the days when Perl was just a replacement for awk and sed and Real Programmers coded in C. While this information might be useful, the opening paragraphs of the Perl syntax documentation is not the place to put it.