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Perl: Languages
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Perl is a flexible, feature-rich and powerful dynamic language. Perl code is very succinct and can be written very quickly, while still performing well in most cases. It is very usual to achieve in one line of Perl what requires 100's of lines in C and other languages.
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Oh, and finally, Perl is a cross platform language. This means that if you write scripts that run on your Win32 machines, they will ... run on Linux, Unix, Macintosh, VMS and a variety of platforms!
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Perl has a context-sensitive grammar which can be affected by code executed during an intermittent run-time phase.[18] Therefore Perl cannot be parsed by a straight Lex/Yacc lexer/parser combination. Instead, the interpreter implements its own lexer, which coordinates with a modified GNU bison parser to resolve ambiguities in the language. It is said that "only perl can parse Perl", meaning that only the Perl interpreter (perl) can parse the Perl language (Perl). The truth of this is attested to by the persistent imperfections of other programs that undertake to parse Perl, such as source code analyzers and auto-indenters, which have to contend not only with the many ways to express unambiguous syntactic constructs, but ... the fact that Perl cannot be parsed in the general case without executing it. Though successful in creating a Perl parser for document-related purposes, the PPI project determined that parsing Perl code as a document (retaining its integrity) and as executable code simultaneously was, in fact, not possible. Specifically the author claimed that, "parsing Perl suffers from the 'Halting Problem.'"[19]
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[S]ome users of the open-source scripting language PHP say it's easier to develop dynamic Web applications in PHP than in Perl; PHP has some Web functions built in that Perl requires modules to perform. However, many who develop their Web pages in PHP still turn to Perl for other back-end functions.
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The Perl community just celebrated the 20th anniversary of Perl. Here are some stories from Perl hackers around the world about problems they've solved and memories they've made with the venerable, powerful, and still vital language.
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The Perl regular expression syntax was originally taken from Unix Version 8 regular expressions. However, it diverged before the first release of Perl, and has since grown to include many more features. Other languages and applications are now adopting Perl compatible regular expressions over POSIX regular expressions including PHP, Ruby, Java, Microsoft's .NET Framework[27], and the Apache HTTP server.
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