Friday, August 8, 2008

What is Perl ?

Perl:

* Perl is a stable, cross platform programming language.
* Perl stands for Practical Extraction and Report Language.
* It is used for mission critical projects in the public and private
sectors.
* Perl is Open Source software, licensed under its Artistic

License or the GNU General Public License (GPL).
* Perl was created by Larry Wall.
* Perl 1.0 was released to usenet's alt.comp.sources in 1987
* PC Magazine named Perl a finalist for its 1998 Technical
Excellence Award in the Development Tool category.
* Perl is listed in the Oxford English Dictionary.


Supported Operating Systems:

* Unix systems
* Macintosh - (OS 7-9 and X) see The MacPerl Pages.
* Windows - see ActiveState Tools Corp.
* VMS
* And many more...


Best Features Of Perl :

* Perl takes the best features from other languages, such as C, awk,
sed, sh, and BASIC, among others.
* Perls database integration interface supports third-party databases including Oracle, Sybase, Postgres MySQL and others.
* Perl works with HTML, XML, and other mark-up languages.
* Perl supports Unicode.
* Perl is Y2K compliant.
* Perl supports both procedural and object-oriented programming.
* Perl interfaces with external C/C++ libraries through XS or SWIG.
* Perl is extensible. There are over 500 third party modules available
from the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network.
* The Perl interpreter can be embedded into
other systems.

PERL and the Web

* Perl is the most popular web programming language due to its text
manipulation capabilities and rapid development cycle.
* Perl is widely known as " the duct-tape of the Internet.
* Perl's CGI.pm module, part of Perl's standard distribution, makes
handling HTML forms simple.
* Perl can handle encrypted Web data, including e-commerce transactions.
* Perl can be embedded into web servers to speed up processing by as
much as 2000%.
* mod_perl allows the Apache web server to embed a Perl interpreter.
* Perl's DBI package makes web-database integration easy.

Reference:
Tutorialpoint

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