Perl/CGI History & Information

Perl is a high-level, dynamic, general purpose and interpreted programming language that was originally develop, in 1987, by Larry Wall who; a linguist working at NASA. According to the developer; Larry Wall, Perl has got two important slogans. The first slogan is “There’s more than one way to do it” and the second slogan is “Easy things should be easy and hard things should be possible”.
The main purpose of developing Perl was text manipulation and it was first used as a general purpose scripting language for UNIX in order to make it easier to process text reports. But now it is used for various other tasks including network programming, Graphical User Interface Development, Web Development and even system administration. Perl has evolved over the time and has become more diverse today. Larry Wall is still supervising the development of the latest version of Perl; Perl 6. Since its introduction, Perl has undergone many changes and innovations. At the 20th anniversary of Perl 1.0, on 18th December, 2007; Perl 5.10.0 was released which included new features that brought it quite closer to the Perl 6. The latest version of Perl available at the moment is Perl 6.

Teach yourself programming

It will take several pages of text for describing all the features of Perl, however, for our readers who have had no experience of working in Perl; here are some of the main features of this programming language:

• Text processing and manipulation
• Support for third party modules
• Support for multiple programming paradigms which may include various programming paradigms like functional, procedural or object oriented.
• Easy to use
• Automatic data typing
• Support for complex data structures
• Support for object oriented programming model
• Support for memory management and much more

One of the important facts about Perl is that it borrows various features from different popular programming languages like AWK, Lisp, C, Shell Scripting etc. The major advantage of using Perl is that it provides really powerful text processing capabilities and it is, without any doubt, the most ideal programming language for manipulation of texts.

Light Reading

Let us have a breif look at the syntax of Perl and build one of the most simplest codes. Whenever you learn any programming language, the first example you come across, most of the time, would be the classic hello world example; so is the case here. We’ll present one of the simplest hello world example for Perl. If you want to write the classic hello world program in Perl then follow the code given below

Print “ Hello, Wolrd \n”

The above piece of Perl code would generate an output of Hello, World followed by a new line. If you have little bit experience of working in C programming language then you would agree that Perl and C has got striking resemblence. Because for the same purpose, the C code would be:

Printf (“Hello, World\n”);

Programming Perl

Did you notice how much Perl code is similar to the C code. The \n in C and Perl is used for entering a newline and print function is used to write an output to the screen. This was one the most simplest examples of Perl; obviously it is not enough for our learners. They should experiment with more line of codes; for that, please visit our section of recommended forums and online learning resources which will guide you and will assist you in finding great online tutorials that will help you in learning Perl from scratch.