How does Perl work?

Answer the question, how does Perl work?

Perl is a language compiled into a syntax tree

Perl source code is compiled into a syntax tree. It's not a one-line execution interpreter.

If the syntax as Perl is wrong, you will get a compile error before execution.

In fact, if you use Perl's "-c" option, you can see that you can only perform the steps up to compilation.

perl -c script.pl

So the answer to the question of how it works no matter how you write it is no.

The fact that it works no matter how you write it means that Perl makes it easy to miss syntax errors.

If the question means this, it is yes or no.

If you can answer no, the following two lines are at the beginning of the source code.

use strict;
use warnings;

It's a good Perl practice to write these two lines when writing source code (unless you're writing a one-liner).

strict tightens the grammar, and warnings display warnings that are easy to miss.

Before the Perl version went up to 5, Perl's core team was aware of the problem that users make a lot of mistakes in Perl.

That's why Perl 5 introduced a mechanism called strict and warnings.

It's actually successful, and it's easy to spot the mistake of forgetting to declare a variable or using an undefined value where it shouldn't.

It's true that Perl around Perl 4 makes it easy to miss syntax errors, but in Perl 5, if you enable strict and warnings, you can easily spot syntax errors.

Perl Philosophy