What Perl is?

If any person had a little bit knowledge of programming then he or she is definitely heard about the PERL.In this post i am going to told you about what perl is, when it was developed, reasons behind development and many other things.

Perl is a dynamic programming language which was developed by Larry Wall in 1987.Actually perl was developed 4 years before the development of LINUX.Perl stands for Practical Extraction and Reporting Language, the meaning of this expansion is that perl is an interpreted programming language with a huge number of uses, libraries and resources.The main reason that is assumed behind the development of PERL is that Mr Wall was unhappy with the functionality of sed, C, awk and the Bourne Shell that these languages offered.

Then after this they decide to made a language that contains advantage of all these languages. The main popularity that the perl earned when it is used as a language for writing server-side scripts for web-servers. In addition to this perl is also used for system administration tasks, managing database data, as well as writing GUI applications. Perl also consists of various capabilities like it can store strings and data structures that are unlimited in size, nested to any depth, it has powerful syntax and built-in functions, it also provide support for namespaces, classes, and objects, it can run on almost any platform imaginable and has relatively portable and secure code.

As all we know perl is an interpreted language so no compilation is needed here. The programs that are written in Perl are known as Perl scripts and the term perl program refers to the system program named perl for executing Perl scripts. Now if you had any previous experience on shell scripts or awk or sed or similar (Unix) utilities for various purposes, you will find that you can normally use Perl for those and many other purposes, and the code tends to be more compact.