Perl is the brainchild of Larry Wall.
He continues to develop and maintain the language, which, through
the help of the net. community, is available on virtually every
computer platform, from Apple Macintosh to VMS.
Perl is an acronym for "Practical
Extraction and Report Language", although you'll sometimes hear it
referred to as the "Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister." It
started out as a scripting language to supplement
rn,
the ubiquitous USENET reader, which Wall also wrote. (Most people
could only dream of writing a program that is installed on every
UNIX box on the planet - Larry has two.)
It is an interpreted language that is
optimized for string manipulation, I/O, and system tasks. It has
built-ins for almost everything that's in section 2 of the UNIX
manuals, which makes it very popular with system administrators. It
incorporates syntax elements from the Bourne shell, csh, awk, sed,
grep, and C.
Perl has gained recent attention in
the explosion of the World Wide Web as a quick and effective way to
mock up applications that provide much of the web's interactivity.
It has a lot of syntax that can make scripts contain more characters
from the top row of the keyboard than any other, but that is not
necessary to get anything done. In fact, there are few of the
traditional limitations that interpreted languages impose.
