If you are new to perl, this is a sort of question that'll give you a load of answers that don't make a lot of sense. However, I might offer perlguts illustrated for what's going on behind the scenes. Also possibly the perlcompile documentation page

It does end up as machine code - as does everything that ever runs on your system. But very few people work in machine code any more, because it's low level and hard work and gives very little net benefit outside of some very specific niche applications.

Practically speaking though - it is unlikely that you will need to be digging this deep with perl - the whole point of it is that it's sufficiently high level that you don't need to care about (most) implementation specific details.

In reply to Re: How does Perl get to executable code? by Preceptor
in thread How does Perl get to executable code? by Todd Chester

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