Introduction
Perl is a general purpose high level multi-paradigm programming language. In 1987, a computer programmer named Larry Wall began working on the development of Perl language at a company called Unisys and released the first version (version 1.0) on December 18, 1987. Perl is actually a set of two programming languages – Perl 5 and Perl 6. When we say just “Perl”, we refer to Perl 5. In October 2019, Perl 6 was officially renamed to Raku. In this book, we well only focus on Perl 5 and refer to it as “Perl”. Although “Perl” does not stand for anything, there exist many unofficial acronyms including “Practical Extraction and Reporting Language”.
Perl is a cross-platform interpreted language that works on over 100 platforms. Being an interpreted language, there is a Perl interpreter that sits on the host system which executes Perl programs/scripts. Some of the wellknown Perl supported platforms are Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, MacOS, OpenVMS, Solaris, etc. It is possible to write a Perl program on one platform (say Windows) and take it to another platform such as Linux or Mac and execute it. The execution will go ahead seamlessly as Perl is a cross platform language. One exception to this feature is that your program should not contain any platform specific code. In case of programming languages such as C/C++ and Java, there is a compiler which compiles a program and generates executable code. Perl adopts a different approach when it comes to
program execution – being an interpreted language, a Perl script is executed line by line by the Perl interpreter.
C programming language is used to implement Perl environment. However, no knowledge of C is needed to learn Perl. Tools and languages such as AWK, BASIC, C/C++, sed, etc. have influenced Perl and languages such as JavaScript, CoffeeScript, Python, Ruby, PHP, etc. have been influenced by
Perl.
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Go To Base64 & Decode:
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