View Source: Perl - Waikato Linux Users Group

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The ProgrammingLanguage itself, as opposed to the interpreter __perl__, which is written a lowercase "p". (See the [glossary | http://www.perl.org/press/glossary.html].)

>  The Perl motto is "There's more than one way to do it." Divining how many more is left as an exercise to the reader. :
>      -- <tt>perl~(1)</tt> ManPage
>  <br> Perl is designed to give you several ways to do anything, so consider picking the most readable one. :
>      -- <tt>perlstyle~(1)</tt> ManPage
>  <br> The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the CamelBook for why. :
>      -- <tt>perl~(1)</tt> ManPage
>  <br> Any ProgrammingLanguage that doesn't occasionally surprise the novice will pay for it by continually surprising the expert. :
>      -- LarryWall

The name stands for __P__ractical __E__xtraction and __R__eporting __L__anguage but also __P__athologically __E__clectic __R__ubbish __L__ister -- pick one, both are official, and both are backronyms.

See PerlOneLiners for one end of the spectrum of the language's application and PerlNotes for various tips.

    [Perl], the Practical Extraction and Report Language, was first released by LarryWall, a linguist and programmer, in 1987. Since then it has become the automation tool of choice for systems administrators and programmers around the world. It is a bytecode compiled general purpose programming language that aims to make work easy, but requires training and practice to use well, and allows for procedural, OO and functional programming styles. Text manipulation is a major strength of the language, in large part due to its RegularExpression syntax which has served as the base for many other RegularExpression engines. It shines at any kind of data munging due to very versatile and powerful data types that are seamlessly allocated, grown, shrunk and garbage collected as necessary. During the years, its community has built a huge library of freely usable modular extensions for almost any purpose imaginable, called [CPAN]. This combination of features makes it ideal for rapid development, testing and maintainance of most any type of application.

    It is available for a bewildering number of platforms: virtually all known and current [Unix] derivatives are supported as are other systems like [Windows], [MacOS], [VMS], [MS-DOS], [OS/2], [QNX], [BeOS], and the [Amiga]. [Perl] is now included in the default installs of [Apple]'s [MacOSX] and [Sun | SunMicrosystems] [Solaris] version 9.

    [Perl] is most commonly associated with web programming, being the development tool of choice for many people serving dynamic, data driven web pages. Several methods are available for running Perl on the web, such as the ever-popular [CGI] and [mod_perl], the enterprise-class application module. According to Security Space, [mod_perl] is deployed on over 1.6 million [Apache] web servers, a constantly-rising figure that does not include the millions of servers running [Perl] through [CGI].

    Sites making use of [Perl] include Amazon.com, Wired, Slashdot.org, Alexa and the Internet Wayback machine, a hundred terabyte archive which is five times larger than the the Library of Congress.

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CategoryProgrammingLanguages, CategoryVeryHighLevelProgrammingLanguages
Last edited on Friday, May 26, 2006 2:44:11 pm by AristotlePagaltzis
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