Editing Perl Data Language (section)

==perldl==
An installation of PDL usually comes with an interactive [[Shell (computing)|shell]] known as '''perldl''', which can be used to perform simple calculations without requiring the user to create a Perl program file. A typical session of perldl would look something like the following:

<syntaxhighlight lang="perl">
perldl> $x = pdl [[1, 2], [3, 4]];

perldl> $y = pdl [[5, 6, 7],[8, 9, 0]];

perldl> $z = $x x $y;

perldl> p $z;

[
 [21 24  7]
 [47 54 21]
]
</syntaxhighlight>

The commands used in the shell are Perl statements that can be used in a program with <code>PDL</code> module included. '''<code>x</code>''' is an [[overloaded operator]] for [[matrix multiplication]], and '''<code>p</code>''' in the last command is a shortcut for '''<code>print</code>'''.