perlglossary - Perl Glossary
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A glossary of terms (technical and otherwise) used in the Perl documentation, derived from the Glossary of Programming Perl, Fourth Edition. Words or phrases in bold are defined elsewhere in this glossary.
Other useful sources include the Unicode Glossary http://unicode.org/glossary/, the Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing http://foldoc.org/, the Jargon File http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/, and Wikipedia http://www.wikipedia.org/.
A used to indirectly inspect or update an object’s state (its instance variables).
The that you supply to a function or subroutine when you call it. For instance, when you call power("puff"), the string "puff" is the actual argument. See also argument and formal arguments.
A such as + or / that tells Perl to do the arithmetic you were supposed to learn in grade school.
A regular component potentially matching a substring containing one or more characters and treated as an indivisible syntactic unit by any following quantifier. (Contrast with an assertion that matches something of zero width and may not be quantified.)
An that takes two operands.
A that is predefined in the language. Even when hidden by overriding, you can always get at a built- in function by qualifying its name with the CORE:: pseudopackage.
A pidgin-like lingo spoken among ’droids when they don’t wish to reveal their orientation (see endian). Named after some similar languages spoken (for similar reasons) between compilers and interpreters in the late 20ᵗʰ century. These languages are characterized by representing everything as a nonarchitecture-dependent sequence of bytes.
A that you register with some other part of your program in the hope that the other part of your program will trigger your handler when some event of interest transpires.
An -passing mechanism in which the formal arguments refer to a copy of the actual arguments, and the subroutine cannot change the actual arguments by changing the formal arguments. See also call by reference.
A whose invocant is a package name, not an object reference. A method associated with the class as a whole. Also see instance method.
An subroutine that, when a reference to it is generated at runtime, keeps track of the identities of externally visible lexical variables, even after those lexical variables have supposedly gone out of scope. They’re called “closures” because this sort of behavior gives mathematicians a sense of closure.
A subpattern whose real purpose is to execute some Perl code—for example, the (?{...}) and (??{...}) subpatterns.
The process of turning source code into a machine-usable form. See compile phase.
In academia, a curriculum vitæ, a fancy kind of résumé. In Perl, an
A bare, single , without any braces, hanging off an if or while conditional. C allows them. Perl doesn’t.
See file descriptor.
See little-endian and big-endian.
See exception or fatal error.
See metasymbol.
A fancy term for an error. See fatal error.
See status.
The garbage of globals (and the running of any associated object destructors) that takes place when a Perl interpreter is being shut down. Global destruction should not be confused with the Apocalypse, except perhaps when it should.
$gollum = new Pathetic::Creature "Sméagol"; give $gollum "Fisssssh!"; give $gollum "Precious!";
print STDERR "Awake! Awake! Fear, Fire, Foes! Awake!\n";
A method whose invocant is an object, not a package name. Every object of a class shares all the methods of that class, so an instance method applies to all instances of the class, rather than applying to a particular instance. Also see class method.
An internal I/O object. Can also mean indirect object.
See method resolution order.
See script.
A holder, the person in charge of pumping the pump, or at least priming it. Must be willing to play the part of the Great Pumpkin now and then.
See regular expression.
Also, in the context of Unicode, a writing system for a particular language or group of languages, such as Greek, Bengali, or Tengwar.
The default output stream for nasty remarks that don’t belong in standard output. Represented within a Perl program by the
If you’re a C or C++ programmer, you might be looking for Perl’s state keyword.
No such thing. See lexical scoping.
See standard error.
See standard input.
See standard I/O.
See standard output.
See derived class.
See base class.
In ancient times, Unix was also used to refer to some code that a couple of people at Bell Labs wrote to make use of a PDP-7 computer that wasn’t doing much of anything else at the time.
Based on the Glossary of Programming Perl, Fourth Edition, by Tom Christiansen, brian d foy, Larry Wall, & Jon Orwant. Copyright (c) 2000, 1996, 1991, 2012 O'Reilly Media, Inc. This document may be distributed under the same terms as Perl itself.