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Perl

Perl has become a popular all-purpose programming language because of its power and ease of use. Once you have mastered the language rules, you can do a lot with a little. One of the mottoes of Perl is Perl Makes Easy Tasks and Easy and Hard Tasks Possible. Another is There's More Than One Way To Do It - TMTOWTDI, pronounced "Tim-Toe-Di."

Perl originated as a text processing language (read about the history here and here). Larry Wall, the creator, needed a language to manage and manipulate a database of text files. He designed Perl to be a language with built-in text processing by incorporating regular expressions and providing a number of text processing functions. There are and have been many other text processing languages: REXX, awk, sed, etc. But Perl has struck a chord, and not only with Open Source developers - it has been ported to all major operating systems and many minor ones. It has been (lovingly) referred to as the duct tape that holds the Internet together. One of the happy results of the spread of Perl is its portability; if created properly, Perl scripts will run on many operating systems with only minor changes, if any.

The name Perl is an uncapitalized acronym for Practical Extraction and Report Language, or Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister - TMTOWTDI.

Perl Links

Perl home page
Latest Perl source
Perl advocacy
Perl mongers
Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN)
Perl news
The Perl Journal
The Perl Review
Perldoc.com

 

     

EXAMPLES:

hello.pl
simpleadd.pl
array1.pl
array2.pl
array3.pl
pushpop.pl
unshiftshift.pl
sortreverse.pl
hash1.pl
hash2.pl
hash3.pl
operators.pl
string.pl
increment.pl
whilearray.pl
whilehash.pl
foreach1.pl
foreach2.pl
memory1.pl
memory2.pl
function1.pl
function2.pl
return1.pl
return2.pl
function3.pl
printargs1.pl
printargs2.pl
function4.pl
stdin1.pl
stdin2.pl
stdin3.pl
file1.pl
file2.pl
file3.pl