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Perl: Programming Perl
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Perl, the Practical Extraction and Report Language, was first released by LarryWall, a linguist and programmer, in 1987. Since then it has become the automation tool of choice for systems administrators and programmers around the world. It is a bytecode compiled general purpose programming language that aims to make work easy, but requires training and practice to use well, and allows for procedural, OO and functional programming styles. Text manipulation is a major strength of the language, in large part due to its RegularExpression syntax which has served as the base for many other RegularExpression engines. It shines at any kind of data munging due to very versatile and powerful data types that are seamlessly allocated, grown, shrunk and garbage collected as necessary. During the years, its community has built a huge library of freely usable modular extensions for almost any purpose imaginable, called CPAN.
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Perl was originally designed by Larry Wall as a flexible text-processing language. Over the years, it has grown into a full-fledged programming language, keeping a strong focus on text processing. When the world wide web became popular, Perl became the de facto standard for creating CGI scripts. A CGI script is a small piece of software that generates a dynamic web page, based on a database and/or input from the person visiting the website. Since CGI script basically is a text-processing script, Perl was and still is a natural choice.
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Perl ... takes features from shell programming. All variables are marked with leading sigils, which unambiguously identify the data type (scalar, array, hash, etc.) of the variable in context. Importantly, sigils allow variables to be interpolated directly into strings. Perl has many built-in functions which provide tools often used in shell programming (though many of these tools are implemented by programs external to the shell) like sorting, and calling on system facilities.
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Perl-compatible regular expressions are ... built into many other programming languages, such as JavaScript, Ruby, Python and PHP. Libraries are available for popular languages like Delphi and C++. Various software applications also allow you to use Perl-compatible regular expressions for certain tasks. The EditPad Pro text editor, for example, supports regular expressions in its search and replace function.
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Perl is most commonly associated with web programming, being the development tool of choice for many people serving dynamic, data driven web pages. Several methods are available for running Perl on the web, such as the ever-popular CGI and mod_perl, the enterprise-class application module. According to Security Space, mod_perl is deployed on over 1.6 million Apache web servers, a constantly-rising figure that does not include the millions of servers running Perl through CGI.
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Short for Practical Extraction and Report Language, Perl is a programming language developed by Larry Wall, especially designed for processing text. Because of its strong text processing abilities, Perl has become one of the most popular languages for writing CGI scripts. Perl is an interpretive language, which makes it easy to build and test simple programs.
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