Perl Facts

  • Perl is a stable, cross platform programming 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 Like Linux
  • Macintosh - (OS 7-9 and X) see The MacPerl Pages.
  • Windows - see ActiveState Tools Corp.
  • VMS
  • And many more...

Perl Features

  • Perl takes the best features from other languages, such as C, awk, sed, sh, and BASIC, among others.
  • Perls database integration interface (DBI) 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 (CPAN).
  • 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.