in reply to starters querry

See this tutorial for a step-by-step example of getting your program to run. Perl is not interactive in that way. You need to save your program in a file and then use the Perl compiler to run it. Or you can run a short program in the command line in this fashion:

perl -e "$a=2; $b = $a + $a; print $b,'\n'"
Dum Spiro Spero