LYCOS RETRIEVER
Perl: Languages
built 658 days ago
Initially developed by Larry Wall in 1987 to automate some Unix administration tasks, Perl has become a popular environment for creating a wide range of applications. It's relatively easy to write small scripts for simple tasks, but the language is powerful enough to satisfy top-notch code jocks.
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The Perl language has become quite popular, especially among those who administrate computers and networks. The practicality and ease of use that Perl provides makes it an indespensable tool in any administrators arsenal.
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Perl's elaborate support for regular expression matching and substitution has made it the language of choice for tasks involving string manipulation, whether for text or binary data. It is particularly popular for writing CGI scripts.
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Perl includes a goto label statement, but it is rarely used. Situations where a goto is called for in other languages don't occur as often in Perl due to its breadth of flow control options.
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How do Perl's regexes work on the inside? Suppose you were going to write a language like Perl, which has regexes, in a language like C, which doesn't? How might you do that?
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A few days ago, Larry Wall (the creator of Perl) released his annual ramblings on Perl called the 'state of the onion'. For those of you interested in some of the design and philosophy that's going into the eventual Perl 6 language, it's an interesting read.
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