What is Perl?
Perl stands for Practical Extraction and Report Language. It is an interpreted programming language whose syntax is derived from the scripting languages Shell, awk and sed and other languages like the C language. It had inspired other languages like PHP, JavaScript, Ruby and Python. Its conception dates back to 1986 by the American Larry Wall. This is intended for systems administration and particularly for processing character strings under Unix. Its use later spread to the fields of Internet software, finance, and bioinformatics.
The purpose of Perl is freedom of development. The Perl developer can therefore write the code as they see fit and decide what is best for the problem at hand. It is therefore a servant language and not a master. The Perl developer community carry the language maintenance.
What is the usage of the Perl language?
For a very long time, it was one of the most popular programming languages. But in recent years, its use has greatly declined in favor of languages like PHP or Python. This does not prevent it from still being very employed, especially in the field of telecommunications networks.
- The Perl language is very popular with system administrators. It allows you to efficiently manipulate texts, files and automate many repetitive tasks.
- Perl entered the web world with the advent of Common Gateway Interface (CGI), particularly for generating, parsing, and updating HTML pages. In addition, it is an adequate tool for prototyping websites during their design.
- Perl is used predominantly in the field of bioinformatics. Its status as a language adapted to data extraction through the use of regular expressions adapts perfectly to the needs of this environment. In addition, there are many modules available such as BioPerl or CodeGen modules.
- Very little is known to the public, but the financial community uses Perl extensively. Indeed, the field of finance is constantly changing. The applications that are used must therefore be easily mutable. Thus, the Perl language, on account of its advantages of ease of programming and rapid integration, perfectly meets this need.
Why you should use the Perl language?
Perl continues to satisfy and still has a bright future ahead. It is in this context that several web hosts continue to include it in their hosting plans. You can find it on the shared hosting plan of a few hosts. But all of them offer it on their VPS server offers.
- It allows you to program scripts and applications very quickly. In addition, learning it is very quick for anyone from the Unix world.
- It is a programming language that is very suitable for applications requiring the manipulation of strings and files. Indeed, the language offers many operators of regular expressions.
- Since it is a very old language, it has an abundant and centralized documentation for easy access.
- Very old languages, has abundant documentation. Documentation is centered for easy access. This archive is what we call CPAN. It includes both software, libraries of ready-to-use functions. This archive is one of the strengths and source of Perl’s success.
- Perl is cross-platform. You find it natively on GNU/Linux, BSD, Unix and Windows machines.
However, the Perl language has the downside of not being suitable for scientific computing. Likewise, resuming a program in Perl is very often difficult because the syntax depends on the needs and style of the developer.