PERL

History Introduced in 1987 Created by Larry Wall Designed with the idea to incorporate parts of C, sed, awk, Unix shell scripting, and Lisp into one language. The second version of Perl was released 8 months after the first version.

History Perl 3.0 was released 2 years after version 1.0 Perl 4.0 was released in 1991 Perl 5.0 (the version used today) was released in 1994. Acts as both a procedural and object-oriented language.

Perl Modules Act as add-ons to the base Perl language (similar to packages in JAVA) Anyone can write and distribute a Perl module. There are over 500 modules available from the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN) Allow you to streamline tasks by providing a consistent API

Network Programming Very easy when you use the sockets interface. Various levels at which you can work with the sockets interface, depending on your needs. There exist modules to make the writing of various client and server applications much easier.

CGI Module Make writing CGI programs much easier. Provides the ability to parse and generate HTML forms quickly Works with Perl’s strength at being able to process text information. Provides ways to keep a CGI program recently used to be available should it be needed a second time. Termed: “Fast CGI”

Example #!/usr/bin/perl use CGI; $cgi = new CGI; print $cgi->header(); print $cgi->start_html(); print "Hello, this is perl.";

Strengths Perl is good for text and file processing. Is strong in recognizing and manipulating text patterns. Makes it useful in building CGI’s and in data mining. Perl also has strong support for database access with its DBI (Database Integration Interface). Perl provides capability to work with a number of other programming languages.

Strengths By borrowing from a lot of other languages Perl is designed to be an easy second language to learn. Because Perl has roots as an Interpreted language you can test it in a more unfinished state. Freely available

Weaknesses Designed more as a command-line based language, but does now include support for graphical user interfaces. Because Perl is has interpreted language roots it can run slower than other languages.