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Concept
Perl
Summary
Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming languages. Perl's first version was released in 1987. Though Perl is not officially an acronym, there are various backronyms in use, including "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language".
Perl was developed by Larry Wall in 1987 as a general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier. Since then, it has undergone many changes and revisions. The latest release is Perl 5, first released in 1994. From 2000 to October 2019 a sixth version of Perl was in development, before the latter's name was officially changed to Raku. Both languages continue to be developed independently by different development teams and liberally borrow ideas from each other.
The Perl languages borrow features from other programming languages including C, sh, AWK, and sed; They provide text processing facilities without the arbitrary data-length limits of many contemporary Unix command line tools. Perl is a highly expressive programming language: source code for a given algorithm can be short and highly compressible.
Perl 5 gained widespread popularity in the mid-1990s as a CGI scripting language, in part due to its powerful regular expression and string parsing abilities. In addition to CGI, Perl 5 is used for system administration, network programming, finance, bioinformatics, and other applications, such as for GUIs. It has been nicknamed "the Swiss Army chainsaw of scripting languages" because of its flexibility and power. In 1998, it was also referred to as the "duct tape that holds the Internet together," in reference to both its ubiquitous use as a glue language and its perceived inelegance.
Perl was originally named "Pearl". Wall wanted to give the language a short name with positive connotations. It is also a Christian reference to the Parable of the Pearl from the Gospel of Matthew. However, Wall discovered the existing PEARL programming language before Perl's official release and changed the spelling of the name and dropped the "a" from the name.
Official source
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