Perl was designed to be a practical language to extract information from text files and generate reports. One of its mottos is There is more than one way to do it (TIMTOWTDI - pronounced 'Tim Toady'). Another is Perl: the Swiss Army Chainsaw of Programming Languages. Its versatility permits versions of many programming paradigms: procedural, functional, and object-oriented---though purists object to Perl's design, which favors convenience to the programmer over clean language design. Perl is often considered the archetypal scripting language.
Some people humorously claim Perl stands for 'Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister' due to the high use of meaningful punctuation characters in the language syntax, as may be seen in this example program to print a greeting:
![[Home]](wikipedia.png)
# A sample Perl program
$message = "Hello, world! The magic number is 234542354.\n";
print $message;
$message =~ s/\d+/-1/;
print $message;
exit 0
and the output:
Hello, world! The magic number is 234542354.
Hello, world! The magic number is -1.
The fourth line of the example shows the use of a regular expression.
In common with C, obfuscated code competitions are a major part of the Perl culture.
Perl has been called the "glue that holds the web together", as it is one of the most popular CGI languages. Perl is available for just about every operating system but is particularly prevalent on Unix and Unix-like systems, and is growing in popularity on Microsoft Windows systems. As an example of Perl in action, Wikipedia is our own slightly customized version of CliffordAdams' UseMod Wiki software -- written in Perl, of course.
Perl is free software, available for many platforms under the Artistic License and GPL.
Related entry : CPAN
Important Perl links: