What is Perl?

The Perl programming language is a high-level, general-purpose, interpretive, dynamic language introduced in 1987 by Larry Wall. Perl programming language was originally developed for text manipulation but is now used for a wide range of tasks including system administration, web development, network programming, and GUI development, among others.

 

Perl Features

  • Perl is a procedural language that uses variables, expressions, assignment statements, brace-delimited blocks, control structures, and subroutines.
  • It is a free and open-source program licensed under GNU.
  • It includes powerful tools to process text to make it compatible with mark-up languages like HTML, and XML.
  • It supports third-party databases including Oracle, MySQL, and many others.
  • Perl supports Unicode.
  • Perl is Y2K compliant.
  • It has a very simple Object-oriented programming syntax.
  • It is embeddable in other systems such as web servers and database servers.
  • Many frameworks are written in Perl.
  • It can handle encrypted web data including e-commerce transactions.
  • It is a cross-platform language.

 

Where is Perl used?

Perl is a scripting language that can be used in numerous fields. Web development is the most popular use of Perl. Other uses of Perl include automating server tasks, generating emails, and cleaning up systems.

Perl is still used for its original purpose of extracting data and generating reports. It can also generate reports on resource use and identify security weaknesses in a network. Because of this, Perl has become a popular language for web development, networking, and bioinformatics.

Perl can also be used for image creation & manipulation. In addition to computer networking, Perl can be used to create graphical user interfaces, VLSI electronics, and to create mail filters to reduce spam.

Perl also implements OOP (object-oriented programming) practices and supports all types of inheritance (simple, multiple, and diamond), polymorphism, and encapsulation.

Perl also has extra modules which permit us to write or use/reuse code written in Python, PHP, PDL, TCL, Octave, Java, C, C++, Basic, Ruby, and Lua in your Perl script.

 

Why use Perl?

The Perl programming language is easy to learn, especially if one has experience in computer programming. Perl was designed to be easy for humans to write and understand instead of making it easy for computers to process. It uses regular expressions. Due to its natural style of language, Perl is more flexible than other programming languages that use specific grammar and syntaxes; therefore, it is platform-independent. Perl can run on any operating system that comes installed with the Perl interpreter, so we can start Perl programming on Linux right away.

 

Advantages

  • Compared to other programming languages, Perl is the most powerful for handling text and parsing.
  • It is an interpreted language with fast execution times by eliminating the need to compile scripts.
  • It is simple and easy to learn.
  • Used in Web development for mostly Payment Gateways.
  • Used in Automation and to test most of the Network and Storage related stuff.
  • The concepts of Perl programming language are similar to other programming languages like sed, sh, C, awk, etc.
  • Perl is a portable programming language and it is also a platform-independent programming language.
  • The Perl programming language can easily be integrated with systems like databases and web servers.

 

Conclusion

Above we have discussed Perl programming language. Through this article we have learnt about what is Perl programming language, its features, advantages, applications and why should we learned Perl programming language? Perl is a powerful and adaptable scripting programming language that supports features of both procedural and object-oriented programming styles. We can easily learn the Perl programming language after learning C and C++ programming languages.