Perl is a programming language developed by Larry Wall, especially designed for text processing. It stands for Practical Extraction and Report Language. It runs on a variety of platforms, such as Windows, Mac OS, and the various versions of UNIX. This tutorial provides a complete understanding on Perl.

Why to Learn Perl?

• Perl is a stable, cross platform programming language.

• Though Perl is not officially an acronym but few people used it as Practical Extraction and Report Language.

• It is used for mission critical projects in the public and private sectors.

• Perl is an Open Source software, licensed under its Artistic License, or the GNU General Public License (GPL).

• Perl was created by Larry Wall.

• Perl 1.0 was released to usenet”s alt.comp.sources in 1987.

• At the time of writing this tutorial, the latest version of perl was 5.16.2.

• Perl is listed in the Oxford English Dictionary.

PC Magazine announced Perl as the finalist for its 1998 Technical Excellence Award in the Development Tool category.

Perl Features

• Perl takes the best features from other languages, such as C, awk, sed, sh, and BASIC, among others.

• Perls database integration interface DBI supports third-party databases including Oracle, Sybase, Postgres, MySQL and others.

• Perl works with HTML, XML, and other mark-up languages.

• Perl supports Unicode.

• Perl is Y2K compliant.

• Perl supports both procedural and object-oriented programming.

• Perl interfaces with external C/C++ libraries through XS or SWIG.

• Perl is extensible. There are over 20,000 third party modules available from the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN).

• The Perl interpreter can be embedded into other systems.

Hello World using Perl.

Just to give you a little excitement about Perl, I”m going to give you a small conventional Perl Hello World program, You can try it using Demo link.

#!/usr/bin/perl

# This will print "Hello, World"
print "Hello, worldn";