Hello World in Perl

Published on 08 April 2018 (Updated: 15 May 2023)

Welcome to the Hello World in Perl page! Here, you'll find the source code for this program as well as a description of how the program works.

Current Solution

print "Hello, World!";

Hello World in Perl was written by:

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How to Implement the Solution

Without further ado, let's dive straight into our implementation of Hello World in Perl.

Well, that was anticlimactic. In fact, it was about as disappointing as our implementations of Hello World in Python and Ruby. That said, who doesn't love a simple implementation (talking to you, Java).

At any rate, let's dig into this a little bit. For starters, we'll notice there are no parentheses required for Perl's print function. I use the word "required" because we can actually call print with them:

print("Hello, World!");

However, from my understanding, it's good Perl style to omit the parentheses for built-in functions.

Oh, I should probably clarify something. In Perl, they're not called functions. Instead, they're called subroutines, and you can declare one of your own using the sub keyword. That's a new one for me!

How to Run the Solution

As usual, we can try the solution using an online Perl interpreter. All we have to do is drop the code into the editor and hit run.

As an alternative, we can always run Perl locally. First, we'll need to get the latest version of Perl from the official website. After that, we should probably get a copy of the solution. Assuming Perl is now in our path, we can get to work:

perl hello-world.pl

Since Perl is a scripting language, we can quickly run the script with the command above. If successful, "Hello, World!" should print to the console.