What is Perl?
Perl is a programming language. Perl stands for Practical Report and Extraction Language. You’ll notice people refer to ‘perl’ and “Perl”. “Perl” is the programming language as a whole whereas ‘perl’ is the name of the core executable. There is no language called “Perl5” — that just means “Perl version 5”. Versions of Perl prior to 5 are very old and very unsupported. Some of Perl’s many strengths are: • Speed of development. You edit a text file, and just run it. You can develop programs very quickly like this. No separate compiler needed. I find Perl runs a program quicker than Java, let alone compare the complete modify-compile-run-oh-no-forgot-that-semicolon sequence. • Power. Perl’s regular expressions are some of the best available. You can work with objects, sockets…everything a systems administrator could want. And that’s just the standard distribution. Add the wealth of modules available on CPAN and you have it all. Don’t equate scripting languages with toy languages. • Usu
Perl is a high-level programming language with an eclectic heritage written by Larry Wall and a cast of thousands. It derives from the ubiquitous C programming language and to a lesser extent from sed, awk, the Unix shell, and at least a dozen other tools and languages. Perl’s process, file, and text manipulation facilities make it particularly well-suited for tasks involving quick prototyping, system utilities, software tools, system management tasks, database access, graphical programming, networking, and world wide web programming. These strengths make it especially popular with system administrators and CGI script authors, but mathematicians, geneticists, journalists, and even managers also use Perl. Maybe you should, too.
Perl is a script-based programming language or scripting language. You can use Perl to write CGIs. Perl scripts are simply text files (upload it using ASCII mode, no compiling needed) and the extension for the file can be either “.pl” or “.cgi”. Perl scripts must be put in the cgi-bin directory in your user directory, and the permissions set to “chmod 755” (user = read/write/execute, group/other = read/execute). See the Permissions Guide for more information. I will not go into the art of Perl programming here. There are lots of pre-configured Perl scripts that perform a variety of functions, from hit counters to guestbooks to rotating banner insertions, which can be found all over the Internet. If you want to learn to program in Perl, buy a book (O’Reilly puts out some good ones), or visit Perl Mongers (formerly The Perl Institute) or www.perl.
