What is Perl programming language?
What is Perl?
Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Perl is a term stands for “Practical Extraction and Reporting Language” even though there is no acronym for Perl. It was introduced by Larry Wall in 1987. Perl language was specially designed for text editing. But now, it is widely used for a variety of purposes including Linux system administration, network programming, web development, etc.
Let’s put it in a simple manner. While computers understand just 0’s and 1’s (binary language/machine language/ [low-level language]), it is very difficult to program in a binary language for us human. Perl is a programming language which uses natural language elements, words that are used in common English language and is, therefore, easier to understand by humans [high-level language]. Now there’s a problem; computers cannot understand high-level languages, which we humans can easily understand. For that, we need something which can translate the high-level language to low-level language. Here interpreter comes to our help. The interpreter is a piece of software which converts the program written in the high-level language to low-level language for the computer to understand and execute the instructions written in the program. Hence, Perl is an interpreted programming language.
Where is Perl used?
The power of Perl scripting language can be implemented in many fields. The most popular use of Perl is in Web development., Perl is also used to automate many tasks in the Web servers, and other administration jobs, it can automatically generate emails and clean up systems. Perl is still used for its original purpose i.e. extracting data and generating reports. It can produce reports on resource use and check for security issues in a network. Due to this reason, Perl has become a popular language used in web development, networking and bioinformatics too. Apart from all this perl can also be used for CGI programming.
Perl can also be utilized for image creation & manipulation. Apart from that networking via telnet, FTP, etc., Graphical User Interface creation, VLSI electronics & to create mail filters to reduce spamming practices are some use cases of Perl.
Perl is also known for implementation of OOP(object oriented programming) practices and supports all forms of inheritance (simple, multiple & diamond), polymorphism and encapsulation. Perl is flexible enough to support Procedural as well as OOP practices simultaneously. Perl also has extra modules which permit you to write or use/reuse code written in Python, PHP, PDL, TCL, Octave, Java, C, C++, Basic, Ruby and Lua in your Perl script. This means that you can combine Perl with these extra programming languages rather rewriting existing code.
Applications of Perl Programming Language
Why use Perl?
It is true that there are other programming languages that can be used to do all the stuff that has been stated above, then why should you specifically use Perl? Perl is very easy to learn, especially if you have a background in computer programming. Perl was designed to be easy for humans to write and understand rather than making it easy for processing by computers. It uses regular expressions. It’s natural style of language is different from other programming languages that use specific grammar and syntaxes; therefore, Perl is very flexible and doesn’t impose on you any particular way of thinking out a solution or a problem. Perl is extremely portable. It can run on any operating system that has Perl interpreter installed, so it is platform independent. All Linux Operating Systems come installed with Perl, so you can start Perl coding in Linux out of the box. This is unlike Shell scripts, where the code changes with the flavor of Linux distribution being used, making it less and less portable Small specific tasks in Perl become very easy and quick. Throughout this Perl tutorial for beginners, you will learn how you can code small, quick programs for specific tasks. Let’s take a simple example of the classic Hello World program which is used to begin learning any programming language which has UNIX as its roots:
Example: Perl hello world
#!/usr/bin/perl print "Hello, world!";
Output:
Hello, world!
The above two lines of code will print Hello, world! Now wasn’t it too simple and quick? Students with knowledge of C, C++ will know that it requires many more lines of code to obtain the same output in those languages.
You might be wondering why Perl is so famous on the Web. It is simple as most of the things that happen on the web are of TEXT and Perl is very good at text processing. If we compare Perl with any of the languages, then Perl will be the best language which is good in File handling, text processing, and output reporting
One of the best advantages of Perl is that it is free to use
The Perl community strongly believes that software should be freely available, freely modifiable and freely distributable. Several volunteers from Perl community strive to make the programming language as good as possible.
0 Response to "What is Perl programming language?"
Post a Comment