The Perl programming language. (Practical Extraction and Report Language)
Perl is a general-purpose programming language originally developed for text manipulation and now used for a wide range of tasks including system administration, web development, network programming, GUI development, and obviously T&M applications.
The language is intended to be practical (easy to use, efficient, complete) rather than beautiful (tiny, elegant, minimal). Its major features are that it's easy to use, supports both procedural and object-oriented (OO) programming, has powerful built-in support for text processing, and has one of the world's most impressive collections of third-party modules.
Perl by default is very forgiving. In order to make it more robust it is recommended to start every program with the following lines:
The two additional lines request from perl to catch various common problems in your code. They check different things so you need both. A potential problem caught by use strict; will cause your code to stop immediately when it is encountered, while use warnings; will merely give a warning (like the command-line switch -w) and let your code run. To read more about them check their respective manual pages at strict and warnings.
Perl is often used as a glue language, tying together systems and interfaces that were not specifically designed to interoperate, and for "data munging",[75] that is, converting or processing large amounts of data for tasks such as creating reports. In fact, these strengths are intimately linked. The combination makes Perl a popular all-purpose language for system administrators, particularly because short programs, often called "one-liner programs", can be entered and run on a single command line.
Perl is implemented as a core interpreter, written in C, together with a large collection of modules, written in Perl and C. As of 2010, the interpreter is 150,000 lines of C code and compiles to a 1 MB executable on typical machine architectures. Alternatively, the interpreter can be compiled to a link library and embedded in other programs. There are nearly 500 modules in the distribution, comprising 200,000 lines of Perl and an additional 350,000 lines of C code (much of the C code in the modules consists of character encoding tables).
The interpreter has an object-oriented architecture. All of the elements of the Perl language—scalars, arrays, hashes, coderefs, file handles—are represented in the interpreter by C structs. Operations on these structs are defined by a large collection of macros, typedefs, and functions; these constitute the Perl C API. The Perl API can be bewildering to the uninitiated, but its entry points follow a consistent naming scheme, which provides guidance to those who use it.
