Perl is one of the programming language. PERL stands for Practical Report and Extraction
Language.
A D V E R T I S E M E N T
You might have noticed people refer to 'perl' and "Perl". "Perl" as a whole is the
programming language, whereas 'perl' is the name of the
executable code. There is no such language called "Perl5" -- that just means "Perl
version 5". Versions of Perl prior to 5 are very old and very unsupported.
Some Perl Facts.
Perl is a stable and cross platform programming language.
It is used for the purpose of mission critical projects in the private and
public sectors.
Perl is a Open Source software, licensed
under its Artistic License, or
the GNU General Public License (GPL).
Perl was created by Mr Larry Wall.
Perl 1.0 was released in 1987 to usenet's alt.comp.sources.
PC Magazine named Perl a finalist for Technical Excellence Award in the Development
Tool category in 1998.
Perl is also listed in the Oxford English Dictionary.
Supported Operating Systems in Perl
Unix systems.
Macintosh - (OS 7-9 and X) see The MacPerl Pages.
Windows - see ActiveState Tools Corp.
VMS.
Features of Perl
Perl takes all the best features from languages, like C, awk, sed,
sh, and BASIC, including others.
The database integration interface of perl supports
third-party databases like Oracle, Sybase, Postgres
MySQL and many others.
Perl works well with HTML, XML, and other mark-up languages.
Perl also supports Unicode.
Perl is a Y2K compliant.
Through XS or SWIG Perl interfaces with external C/C++ libraries.
Perl is extensible. There are more than 500 third party modules which are available
from the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network.
The Perl interpreter can also be embedded into other systems.
Web and the Perl
Due to its text manipulation capabilities and rapid development cycle, Perl
has become the most popular web programming language.
Widely Perl is known as " the duct-tape of the Internet".
Perl's CGI.pm module which is a part of Perl's standard distribution, makes
HTML forms handling simple.
Including e-commerce transactions, Perl can handle encrypted Web data.
We can embed Perl into web servers to speed up the processing by as much as 2000%.
Apache web server is allowed to embed a Perl interpreter by mod_perl Web-database
integration is made easy by Perl's DBI package.
