Perl

Perl is a general-purpose programming language originally developed for text manipulation and now used for a wide range of tasks including system administration, web development, network programming, GUI development, and more.

What is Perl?

• Perl is a stable, cross platform programming language.
• Though Perl is not officially an acronym but few people used it as Practical Extraction and Report Language.
• It is used for mission critical projects in the public and private sectors.
• Perl is an Open Source software, licensed under its Artistic License, or the GNU General Public License (GPL).
• Perl was created by Larry Wall.
• Perl 1.0 was released to usenet’s alt.comp.sources in 1987.
• At the time of writing this tutorial, the latest version of perl was 5.16.2.
• Perl is listed in the Oxford English Dictionary.

PC Magazine announced Perl as the finalist for its 1998 Technical Excellence Award in the Development Tool category.

Perl Features

• Perl takes the best features from other languages, such as C, awk, sed, sh, and BASIC, among others.
• Perls database integration interface DBI supports third-party databases including Oracle, Sybase, Postgres, MySQL and others.
• Perl works with HTML, XML, and other mark-up languages.
• Perl supports Unicode.
• Perl is Y2K compliant.
• Perl supports both procedural and object-oriented programming.
• Perl interfaces with external C/C++ libraries through XS or SWIG.
• Perl is extensible. There are over 20,000 third party modules available from the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN).
• The Perl interpreter can be embedded into other systems.

Perl and the Web

• Perl used to be the most popular web programming language due to its text manipulation capabilities and rapid development cycle.
• Perl is widely known as “the duct-tape of the Internet“.
• Perl can handle encrypted Web data, including e-commerce transactions.
• Perl can be embedded into web servers to speed up processing by as much as 2000%.
• Perl’s mod_perl allows the Apache web server to embed a Perl interpreter.
• Perl’s DBI package makes web-database integration easy.