What Is PERL?
(An excerpt from:
Practical Extraction and Report Language)
"Perl is a language optimized for scanning arbitrary text files, extracting
information from those text files, and printing reports based on that
information. It's also a good language for many system management tasks.
The language is intended to be practical (easy to use, efficient, complete)
rather than beautiful (tiny, elegant, minimal).
Perl combines (in the author's opinion, anyway) some of the best features
of C, sed, awk, and sh, so people familiar with those languages should
have little difficulty with it. (Language historians will also note some
vestiges of csh, Pascal, and even BASIC-PLUS.) Expression syntax corresponds
quite closely to C expression syntax. Unlike most Unix utilities, Perl
does not arbitrarily limit the size of your data--if you've got the memory,
Perl can slurp in your whole file as a single string. Recursion is of
unlimited depth. And the tables used by hashes (previously called "associative
arrays'') grow as necessary to prevent degraded performance. Perl uses
sophisticated pattern matching techniques to scan large amounts of data
very quickly. Although optimized for scanning text, Perl can also deal
with binary data, and can make dbm files look like hashes. Setuid Perl
scripts are safer than C programs through a dataflow tracing mechanism
which prevents many stupid security holes."
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