This tells the shell to spawn a subshell in which the following code will be executed by the specified program. If you're aware of that quirk, it's not a big deal. Better yet, just remember to use the semicolons. The thing is, I'm constantly trying to improve - and I'd surely like to see that idea take hold. Because of this, you can structure your Perl code to convey the idea of what it is you're doing.
Most modern languages allow additional whitespace in order to make the code human-readable.
The three types of variables in Perl are scalars , arrays , and hashes . Note that, while arrays are stored in numerical order, hashes are not - retrieving the first element of a hash will often have nothing to do with the first element you loaded into it. Hash elements are referred to by their keys, not their position in the structure. They are in different name spaces . The output says that there's no difference.