By using perl as a scripting language instead of a “traditional” shell, you can use much more C-like syntax without sacrificing functionality.

To see how associative arrays work, we’re going to look at both the Korn shell and Perl, though only the newest version of the Korn shell (referred to as “korn93”) supports associative arrays.

Three years ago, Lynn Greiner interviewed the big cheeses responsible for the popular scripting languages PHP, Perl, Tcl, Python, Ruby and JavaScript to find out where the languages were headed ...