Something about Perl

Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. it was originally developed by Larry Wall in 1987 as a general-purpose UNIX scripting language to make report processing easier. it borrows features from other programming languages including C, shell scripting, awk and sed. the language provides powerful text processing facilities without the arbitrary data length limits of your contemporary UNIX tools, facilitating easy manipulation of text files. perl gained wide spread popularity in the late 1990 s as a CGI scripting language, in part due to its parsing abilities, and the Perl 6 will be released in the following days. in addition to CGI, Perl is used for graphics programming, system administration, network programming, finance, bioinformatics, and other applications.

Perl is a general-purpose programming language originally developed for text manipulation, but as of 2010 is used for a wide range of tasks including system administration, web development, network programming, games, bioinformatics, and GUI development. it is intended to be practical (easy to use, efficient, complete) rather than beautiful (tiny, elegant, minimal ). its major features include support for multiple programming paradigms, reference counting memory management, built-in support for text processing, and a large collection of third-party modules.

The overall structure of Perl derives broadly from C. perl is procedural in nature, with variables, expressions, assignment statements, brace-delimited blocks, control structures, and subroutines. it also takes features from shell programming. all variables are marked with leading sigils, which unambiguously identify the data type of the variable in context. importantly, sigils allow variables to be interpolated directly into strings. perl has implements built-in functions that provides tools often used in shell programming such as sorting, and calling on system facilities. as the development of the core language, Perl 5 added features that support complex data structures, first-class functions, and an object-oriented programming model. these include references, packages, class-based method dispatch, and lexically scoped variables, along with compiler ctictives. A major additional features introduced with Perl 5 was the ability to package code as Reusable Modules. to sum up, all version of perdrop automatic data-typing and automatic memory-management. the interpreter knows the type and storage requirements of every data object in the program; it allocates and frees storage for them as necessary using reference counting.

The Design of Perl can be understood as a response to three broad trends in the computer industry: falling hardware costs, rising labor costs, and improvements in compiler technology. it has features that specifies the task of the programmer at the expense of greater CPU and memory requirements. these include automatic memory management; dynamic typing; strings, lists, and hashes; Regular Expressions; introspection; and an eval () function. it follows the theory of "No built-in limits", and idea similar to the zero one infinity rule.

Perl has functions and varied applications, compounded by the availability of standard and third-party modules. however, it's often used as a glue language, typing together systems and interfaces that were not specifically designed to interoperate, and for "datamunging", that is, converting or processing large amounts of data for tasks such as creating reports. in additions, it's also widely used in finance and in bioinformatics, where it is valued for rapid application development and deployment and for its capability to handle large data-sets.

Besides, Perl is widely favored for database applications. its text-Handing Facilities are useful for generating SQL queries; arrays, hashes, and automatic memory management make it easy to collect and process the returned data.

Something about Perl