Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!fluke!inc
From: inc@tc.fluke.COM (Gary Benson)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Novice Questions
Keywords: novice, questions
Message-ID: <14624@fluke.COM>
Date: 5 Feb 90 07:40:44 GMT
Sender: news@tc.fluke.COM
Organization: John Fluke Mfg. Co., Inc., Everett, WA
Lines: 43

Hello -- I am a novice not just to PERL, but to programming itself.
I work with PERL scripts written by someone else, and fortunately he
did a nice job of structuring and commenting his work, so I have been
(mostly) able to make any little modifications that have been needed.

However, I have a new job facing me that requires me to write a PERL script
totally from scratch, and I am finding that my ignorance of programming
concepts in general is hindering my understanding of the on-line PERL
manual. I hope it is not inappropriate to pose very rudimentary questions
here, but if it is, I'll refrain and look somewhere else for the information
I need. Following is a short list of questions I have right now. They are in
order of the urgency with which I think I should learn them.

1. How would I make the first n characters on a line into a variable?
   What if I needed to make the characters at positions 8-10 a variable?

2. Can PERL create two output files, one containing the "massaged"
   information from an input file, the other containing data collected while
   the first file was being created? Is it necessary to do that? It seems
   that the same thing could be accomplished in an array whose contents are
   written at the end of the "massaged data" file. Is that true? How would
   either of these things be done?

3. Could some kind soul give me short, usable, un-esoteric definitions of
   the following terms? Each of these appears somewhere in the PERL manual:

   data type
   scalars
   arrays of scalars
   associative arrays of scalars
   array element
   struct tm
   literals, pseudo-literals
   filehandle

Thanks in advance for any help. This newsgroup as a whole seems rather
advanced, so a mailed answer may be more appropriate than a posting. And if
my posting is inappropriate, please just say so and I'll refrain.



-- 
Gary Benson   -=[S M I L E R]=-   inc@fluke.tc.com