I am new to perl and have so far only done a few cgi scripts on my website and now I want to do some Perl programming on my apple computer running tiger. The problem is that all of the programs I make are automatically saved as "classic applications" and when they are clicked they just bounce in the dock and don't do anything.

I'm not 100% but it sounds like you're using MacPerl - the Classic port of Perl, rather than the built in Perl on Tiger.

Try this. Save this file using your text editor of choice as "hello.pl":

#! /usr/bin/perl

print "hello world\n";
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Then start up the Terminal.app and type:

perl hello.pl
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The should then run. If it doesn't let us know what happens and what error messages you get.