Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics

The interesting thing about this program is that it shows how reading from a file works. Every time you read into a scalar variable such as $protein, the next line of the file is read. Something is remembering where the previous read was and is picking it up from there. On the other hand, the drawbacks of this program are obvious. Having to write a few lines of code for each line of an input file isn't convenient. However, there are two Perl features that can handle this nicely: arrays (in the next section) and loops (in Chapter 5)