Interesting Facts About Perl
Perl is a general-purpose, high level interpreted and dynamic programming language. It was developed by Larry Wall, in 1987. There is no official Full form of the Perl, but still, the most used expansion is “Practical Extraction and Reporting Language“. Perl supports both procedural and Object-Oriented programming. Perl is a lot similar to C syntactically and is easy for the users who have knowledge of C, C++.
Here are some interesting facts about the Perl language:
- Perl was first made to alternate the text files. It has been changed many times to do things in addition to changing text files. Sometimes Perl code is hard to read as it is written using many symbols besides letters and numbers.
- Perl was initially named “Pearl.” Larry Wall gave it a short name with positive connotations. He also thought about providing the title to it after his wife, Gloria. Wall revealed the existing PEARL programming language before Perl’s official release and changed the spelling of the name.
- It is very excellent at finding through the text searching for patterns, which allows people to look words that they may be looking for and change them with several words much more instantly than they would if they had to do it one word at a time.
- Perl is licensed under both the GNU General Public License and the Artistic License 1.0. The text-handling capabilities of Perl can be used for creating SQL queries. Hashes, Arrays, and automatic memory management make it easy to collect and process the returned data.
- Once, when Perl code is compiled, there is additional overhead through the execution phase, which is usually not present for programs written in compiled languages such as C or C++. Examples are Biotech interpretation, reference-counting memory management, and dynamic type checking.
- Perl is also an optional element of the popular LAMP technology stack for Web development, in place of PHP or Python.
- Perl runs on more than 100 platforms from portfolio to mainframe and is suitable for both rapid prototyping and large-scale development projects.
- Perl introduces robust tools for processing text, which make it absolute for working with XML, HTML, and all other natural and mark-up languages.