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Syntax Conventions (cont)

Any unadorned identifiers are either
  • names of built in (or other) functions   (e.g. chomp, split, ...)
  • control-structures   (e.g. if, for, foreach, ...)
  • literal strings (like the shell!)
The latter can be confusing to C/Java/PHP programmers e.g. 

$x = abc;   is the same as   $x = "abc";

Reminder: this construct is an error in PHP, but sometimes works same as in Perl.