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PERL - Practical Extraction and Report Language

8 August 2008
Author: AkilaManivel Posted under Technical Department

History of Perl
It was developed in the mid 1980’s by Larry Wall as a replacement for an overtaxed awk. First version of Perl got released to a large group of users in 1988. It still remains “Freeware” but it is not associated with any of the formal free UNIX software version of Perl for Windows – NT.
The reason for its creation was that Wall was unhappy by the functionality that sed, C, awk and the Bourne Shell offered him. He looked for a language that will combine all of their best features, while having as few disadvantages of its own.
Perl became especially popular as a language for writing server-side scripts for web-servers. But that’s not the only use of perl, as it is commonly used for system administration tasks, managing database data, as well as writing GUI applications

Introduction:

It is an interpreted language optimized for

    Scanning arbitrary text files
    Extracting information from those text files,&
    printing reports based on that information.

It is also a very good language for many system management tasks. The language is intended to be practical

    Easy to use
    Efficient
    Complete

It combines some of the best features of C, sed, awk, and sh. So people familiar with these languages will not have much difficulty with this PERL language. Expression syntax of Perl corresponds quite closely to C Expression syntax.

Characteristics of Perl

• Untyped language, one variable can hold more than one kind of data (numbers, strings, pointers).
• “Dynamic Memory allocation” – programmer need not worry about the size of arrays, strings etc.,
• “Interpreted” rather than compiled. i.e The development cycle does not involve a separate compilation process.
• Even if it is slower than dedicated development languages like “C” and “C++”, it is faster than scripting tools like “csh”.

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