The first version of Perl (Perl 1.000) was published in 1987 by Larry Wall; so Perl is 4 years senior to Linux. Larry Wall was at that time working with UNIX commands and was not happy by the operation of sed, awk and the Bourne Shell. He was searching for a language that will provide him all the supreme features of the UNIX commands and having very minimum margin of error.
In 1994 Perl 5.0 was published. This version was a replica of Perl Interpreter. In addition to that, it had hard references and object concept. But the evolution of Perl is a continuous process and the latest version is Perl 5.8.X.
Initially Perl was used for the server-side scripting in Web-Servers but now it is massively being used in system administration tasks, manipulating databases and creating GUI applications etc.
Perl offers:
1. In depth access of strings and data structures.
2. Strong debugger attached with visual front-ends.
3. Execution in every platform.
4. Provision of namespaces, classes and objects.
5. Comparatively portable.
6. Extensive syntax and in-built functions.
Some Salient Features of Perl:
1. Both the structured-oriented and the object-oriented programming technologies are supported by Perl.
2. Perl supports the third-party database inferences such as MySQL, Sybase, and Oracle etc.
3. It is an open-source language.
4. Perl is compatible with Y2K.
5. As it is an Open-Source language, it can be embedded into other system.
6. Perl is compiled with Over 500 third party utilities which increases its adaptability.
7. Perl is compatible with XML, HTML etc
Perl is compatible with following O.S.:
1. Unix systems
2. Macintosh - (OS 7-9 and X)
3. Windows
4. Linux
Perl and the world of web:
1. Text manipulation capabilities and rapid development cycle made Perl the most popular language in the world of Web development.
2. It can work with the encrypted data which helps it to operate e-commerce transaction.
3. Perl energises the processing capacity of Web servers by 2000%.
Resemblance with Natural Language:
Natural languages are those which people use in their daily life, as a colloquial language. These languages are rich, complete and allow the users to express their feelings more accurately and briefly. The relevance between Perl and Natural language is that they go parallel. Larry Wall, the creator of Perl was a linguist and used his linguistic knowledge to design Perl.
As every natural language becomes appreciable by the people of all skills and circumstances; even a kid is allowed to express himself to others. Perl is something like that, as it can be written in small code and also by the naive programmers. It is a very worthy language with several features. It is recommended for the learner of Perl to keep the versatility of Perl in their mind. As a slight change in the source code can result a big change in the runtime. As Perl is manual handy, so it is also recommended to use the manuals of Perl to understand others' code.
PERL is one of the earliest and popular open source language for scripting server side code.
