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.
