History of creation, Perl – what is it?
The Perl language was created in 1987 by Larry Wall, an American programmer with a linguistic background. A year after its creation, in 1988, the language has support for regular expressions, and in 1989, the processing of data submitted in binary form. Work on the Perl language has not stopped. Recent versions of Perl added support for complex data types and the object model.
Features of the Perl language
Perl structure is similar to the language of C. Some properties of the language Perl are borrowed from shell languages UNIX – systems.
A distinctive feature of the language is the ability to write programs from one line. They are used directly in the call line of the command interpreter.
Advantages of
The advantages of the Perl language are:
- built-in tools for working with complex structures;
- free syntax (one and the same task can be solved in different ways);
- Many ready-made libraries and modules;
- support for working with regular expressions;
- simple processing of large amounts of data;
- ability to program in object-oriented or “functional” style;
- cross-platform.
Disadvantages
For some tasks, some of the advantages of Perl turn into disadvantages. A large number of modules makes them difficult to find, which is not liked by programmers who need only a couple of specific ones.
The language retains the previously popular but now obsolete approaches. Nevertheless, some of them may be well suited for specific programming tasks.
What is it used for?
Windows and UNIX system support
The Perl language is popular with UNIX and Windows system administrators. Its features make it possible not to use other software tools to perform administrative tasks. Perl can be used to control computers from the command line, to control one program over another, and other functions.
Email
Perl is a suitable tool for automating email processing. It is used to set up filtering of messages according to given parameters, to organize mailings, and to solve many other problems.
CGU Scripts
CGU – scripts are used due to the necessity of processing the data entered by the user at the html page. A special program runs on the server and generates a response to the user after the data is entered. The Perl language has become widespread in this area because of the ease of implementation of the required functions.
Web-node support
Web-node is a repository of textual information in html-pages. Perl language is designed with the need to process large amounts of text data, so it is widely used in this area.