Learn More About Perl

Perl Facts

• Perl is a stable, cross platform programming language.
• It is used for mission critical projects in the public and private sectors.
• Perl is Open Source software, licensed under its Artistic License, or the GNU General Public License.
• Perl was created by Larry Wall.
• Perl 1.0 was released to usenet's alt.comp.sources in 1987
• PC Magazine named Perl a finalist for its 1998 Technical Excellence Award in the Development Tool category.
• Perl is listed in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Supported Operating Systems

• Unix systems
• Macintosh - (OS 7-9 and X) see The MacPerl Pages.
• Windows - see ActiveState Tools Corp.
• VMS
• And many more...

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 500 third party modules available from the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN).
• The Perl interpreter can be embedded into other systems.

Perl and the Web

• Perl is the most popular web programming language due to its text manipulation capabilities and rapid development cycle.
• Perl is widely known as "the duct-tape of the Internet".
• Perl's CGI.pm module, part of Perl's standard distribution, makes handling HTML forms simple.
• Perl can handle encrypted Web data, including e-commerce transactions.
• Perl can be embedded into web servers to speed up processing by as much as 2000%.
• mod_perl allows the Apache web server to embed a Perl interpreter.
• Perl's DBI package makes web-database integration easy.

Browse Our Perldocs by Letter

A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M

N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z