Terminology

In general, the terminology used with Perl isn’t so different than that used to describe other programming languages. However, there are a few terms with slightly peculiar meanings. Also, as Perl has evolved, some terminology has faded from fashion and some new terminology has arisen.

In general, the name of the language is Perl, with a capital P, and perl is the name of the program that compiles and runs your source. Unless we are specifically referring to the interpreter, we default to using the capitalized version.