In Perl, the first element of an array can be accessed using its index value which is always 0. Here's an example:
my @array = ("apple", "banana", "orange");
my $first_element = $array[0];
print "The first element of the array is: $first_element\n";
In the example above, the @array variable is initialized with 3 elements. We then access the first element of the array using the $array[0] syntax and assign it to the $first_element variable. Finally, we print out the value of the $first_element variable using the print statement.
This will output the following:
The first element of the array is: apple
Note that we use the @ symbol to declare an array in Perl, and the $ symbol to declare a scalar variable that will hold a single value.