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