Custom syntax definition - What does PERL=1 really do ???

[mattmc3]

According to the help documentation, when creating a syntax definition you must have the first line be one of the following:

C=1
TEXT=1
PERL=1
LaTeX=1
HTML=1

According to the docs: "PERL=1 is a variant of C=1, to take account of some peculiarities of Perl syntax.". What does this mean? What *exactly* does PERL=1 do? The perl.syn that is distributed with TextPad has C=1 at the top of the file, so I'm even more baffled.

The reason I ask is that even though TextPad is well suited for Perl, I'm having problems actually using it due to the whacked syntax highlighting I get on any files that have RegExs. Anything with a quote, apostrophe, or some other character that otherwise would equate to legit syntax warps my color coding. I've tried things like using CommentStartAlt=/ & CommentEndAlt=/, but that kills me on division, as well as RegEx substitution where there are 3 slashes (ex: s/a/b/).

I'd like to know all the ins and outs of what PERL=1 actually means in a syntax file so that I have some hope of modifying something to actually work for me. LaTeX=1 is equally a mystery. Otherwise, I guess it's back to Notepad++ for me when hacking Perl.