Tinkering with Perl

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Statements

Let's say that you are going to play at a friend's house. What you might do, could be explained as a list of activities:

Ask your parents for permission to visit your friend.
Call your friend's house, and ask permission to come over.
Finish getting dressed.
Walk over to your friend's house.
Take chewing gumm off of your shoe.
Greet your friend.
Play with your friend.
Eat a snack.
Play some more.
Say goodbye.
Walk home.
Take off your shoes.

What we have done here, is to break one bigger activity (visiting your activity) into a sequence of smaller activities. Another way of putting it is that we are explaining how to visit your friend by saying what smaller things are necessary to visit your friend.

When you are programming a computer, you do the same thing. The little commands are called statements. A statement is a command that tells a computer to do something small, as a part of doing something larger. (Saying to walk to your friend's house, when you are explaining how to visit your friend, is like a statement.)

As we work further, we will learn more about different kinds of statements. But first, let's make sure that we understand what a statement is: a statement is an individual command you give to the computer, as part of telling it how to do something. In the description of how to visit a friend's house, each line, like "Greet your friend," or "Remove chewing gum from your shoe," is like a statement. The whole list, all together, is like a program.

One final note about statements: In English, you usually end a sentence with a period ('.'). In Perl and many other computer languages, you end most statements with a semicolon (';'). For example:

This sentence ends like a statement;

Tinkering with Perl

Statements

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