The University of Florida Perl Archive
What is Perl?
Perl, created, written, developed, and maintained by Larry Wall (lwall@netlabs.com), is a language for processing text. Sounds pretty harmless, doesn't it? Perhaps at one time it was pretty harmless, but in its present state, with its sophisticated pattern matching capabilities, straightforward I/O, and flexible syntax, Perl is anything but harmless. In fact, by borrowing heavily from C, sed, awk, and the Unix shells, Perl has become the language of choice for many I/O, file processing and management, process management, and system administration tasks.What does "Perl" stand for?
"Perl" is an acronym for "Practical Extraction and Report Language," although Larry has been known to claim that it really stands for "Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister."What else is there to know about Perl?
Tons. But fortunately for you, gentle reader, the net.gods have smiled upon Perl, and information on the subject abounds online. The kind folk at comp.lang.perl.misc, for instance, are always happy to share advice and anecdotes. But please read the FAQ so that you don't trouble them with questions whose answers you should already know (the list is available both as vanilla ASCII and as hypertext). And for those of you who prefer to figure things out on your own, the perl4 man page comes in a handy hypertext form (courtesy of rgs@cs.cmu.edu).But that's not all! Perl programmers are toolsmiths one and all, and being generally friendly people (and perhaps a bit proud of their work), they like to share their creations, hence UF's Perl FTP archive (it's also a great place to get the latest version of Perl, browse the Perl newsgroup archives, and find a whole bunch of Perl-related stuff). Perl programmers are also pretty playful people (which sometimes leads them to alliterate with abandon) and like to have fun while they code (most may not even distinguish between work and play when it comes to Perl).
And finally, lest you think that what you are reading claims to be the only Perl site, there are plenty of others for you to visit:
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japh@cis.ufl.edu