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Why do Perl variables need to start with different characters (sigils)?
Scalar variables start with $
Hashes start with %
Arrays start with @
Why are they like this?
When I started out using Perl it was explained to me that these characters were chosen because:
$looked a bit like an ‘s’ so that was for scalars,@has an ‘a’ in the middle so that was for arrays, and%was for hashes because it looked like a key-value pair divided by a slash.