Perl
Perl
(Practical Extraction and Report Language) is a
stable, cross platform dynamic programming language. It was created by
Larry Wall, with its first release in 1987.
Structurally, Perl is based on the brace-delimited block style
of AWK
and C, and was widely adopted for its strengths in text processing and
lack of the arbitrary limitations of many scripting languages at the
time.
The language is intended to be practical (easy to use,
efficient, complete) rather than beautiful (tiny, elegant, minimal).
Its
major features include support for multiple programming paradigms
(procedural,
object-oriented, and functional styles), automatic memory management,
built-in support for text processing, and a large collection of
third-party modules.
Key
features include:
- Integrates the best features from other languages
- Perl's database integration interface (DBI) supports
third-party databases including Oracle, Sybase, Postgres,
MySQL
and
others
- Works with HTML, XML, and other mark-up languages
- Supports both procedural and object-oriented programming
- Perl interfaces with external C/C++ libraries through XS or
SWIG.
- Perl is extensible. There is a huge collection of
third party modules
available from the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN), covering
many purposes including science, system administration, database
access, networking etc..
- The Perl interpreter can be embedded into other systems
- Supports Unicode
- Handles encrypted Web data, including e-commerce
transactions
- Can be embedded into web servers to speed up processing
- mod_perl allows the Apache
web server to embed a Perl
interpreter. It is a way to create dynamic content by
utilizing
the full power of the Apache
web server to create stateful sessions,
customized user authentication systems, smart proxies and much more
- Perl's DBI package makes web-database integration easy
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