Perl

Perl is a family of high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming languages. The languages in this family include Perl 5 and Perl 6.

Perl provides powerful text processing facilities without the arbitrary data-length limits of many contemporary Unix commandline tools, facilitating easy manipulation of [[Text file|text files].

Perl 5 gained widespread popularity in the late 1990s as a CGI scripting language, in part due to its regular expression and string parsing abilities.

In addition to CGI, Perl 5 is used for graphics programming, system administration, network programming, finance, bioinformatics, and other applications.

It has been nicknamed "the Swiss Army chainsaw of scripting languages" because of its flexibility and power, and possibly also because of its "ugliness".

In 1998, it was also referred to as the "duct tape that holds the Internet together", in reference to both its ubiquitous use as a glue language and its perceived inelegance.

External links

• Official website
• Perl @ Wikipedia