What is Perl?

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 builtins 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.

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

johnsonb@ncsa.uiuc.edu

Last modified: June 19, 1997