Practical Extraction & Report

Language

By: B.T.R Naidu

Email: tiru.naidu@gmail.com
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PERL
Overview

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Perl Overview
What is Perl?
Perl stands for Practical Extraction
and Report Language

Created by Larry Wall

"Perl

is designed to make the easy jobs easy, without

making the difficult jobs impossible."

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-- Larry Wall

What is Perl?
Perl is a text and file-manipulation
language, originally intended to scan
large amounts of text, process it,
and produce nicely formatted reports
from that data.
Perl is concise and allows you to
create very quick and easy solutions.
Highly portable and readily available
on most Unix boxes.
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Usage of PERL
Perl evolved hand-and-glove with the Internet,
and gained rapid popularity in its early days as a
language for writing quick utility scripts.
It also gained popularity as a language for writing
server-side CGI scripts for web servers.
Release 5 took Perl to a new level by introducing
object-oriented programming features.
Version 5.005 introduced
threaded programming

initial

support

for

In the future is Perl 6, a complete and fully

object-oriented re-implementation of Perl from
the ground up.
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History
Larry Wall, a systems programmer,
developed Perl in 1986.
He conceived it, after he felt the necessity
for a good file manipulation and report
generation tool.
It is an evolving language, continuously
being updated to support new features.
Despite this, it is still an easy language to
learn.
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Perls Advantages
Perl has Advanced Language Features
Easy manipulation of processes, files, and strings
Very portable
Interpreted
Higher level constructs than shell scripts
More functionality than awk/sed
Regular expression enhancements.
It is available on most server platforms like Unix,
Ms-Dos,
Windows-NT,
Windows
95,
OS/2,
Macintosh etc, for free.
Perl has no limitations for line length or array size
unlike C or other languages.
Subroutines in Perl can have recursion to any
number of levels.

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Perl's Disadvantages
Since Perl is an interpreter it will not be as fast as
its complier counterparts like C, C++ etc.
Perl is a developing language. So applications
that rely on certain features of a particular
version have to adapt to the feature changes.
Perl is not a suitable language for distributing
applications that include trade secrets or for
keeping your programming technique as a secret.
Perl does not impose good programming practice,
so it is also easy to write badly constructed and
hard-to-read code through sloppy programming.

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Major features of Perl5

Perl 5 is the latest version in an
ongoing evolution of the Perl
language.
The major new features of Perl
version 5:
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)

Multi-threading support
Integration with the Perl Compiler
Integration with Win32
Fancier regexps
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Summery
Uses

Shell scripts
CGI, web engines

Good at

Text processing
Small/Medium sized projects
Quick solutions
Portability (to a certain degree)

Bad at

Efficient large scale computation

Neat code!
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