Perl Introduction

What is Perl ?
  1. Perl stands for Practical Extraction and Reporting Language. 
  2. It is a high level programming language written by Larry Wall, especially designed for processing text. It supports object oriented programming and its syntax is quite similar to C language. 
  3. It is much more flexible to use. 
  4. Due to its strong text processing abilities, it has become one of the most popular languages for writing CGI scripts.
Perl is Compiler or Interpreter?
  1. Perl is said to be both compiler and interpreter. 
  2. It reads the source code, convert the program into byte code before execution and then run it. Hence, Perl is sometimes called an interpreter/compiler.
What are the features of Perl language.
  1. It has a very simple Object-oriented programming syntax.
  2. It is easily extendible as it supports 25,000 open source modules.
  3. It supports Unicode.
  4. Includes powerful tools to process text to make it compatible with mark-up languages like HTML, XML.
  5. It supports third party database including Oracle, MySQL and many others.
  6. It is embeddable in other systems such as web servers and database servers.
  7. It is open source software licensed under GNU.
  8. Many frameworks are written in perl.
  9. It can handle encrypted web data including e-commerce transactions.
  10. It is a cross platform language.
  11. It offers a regular expression engine which is able to transform any type of text.
What are the advantages of Perl language?
  1. Its syntax is simple, which makes it easy to understand.
  2. It supports OOP concepts.
  3. Perl programs runs easily on the system.
  4. It is more flexible to use.
  5. It supports all platforms and is much more portable.
  6. It has a rich set of Perl modules and free software.
  7. It is much more efficient to work on text and string manipulation as it is a scripting language.
  8. Perl combines features of many other languages which make it easy to understand.
What are the disadvantages of Perl language?
  1. A Perl program containing CPAN modules will not run on another system which doesn't have CPAN modules installed.
  2. It is an interpretative language, so it is slower in comparison with other languages.
  3. It has untidy and unreadable codes.
  4. It starts creating problems when code is larger than 200 lines.
  5. It is not portable.
What is CPAN in Perl?
CPAN stands for Comprehensive Perl Archive Network. It is a repository which contains thousands of Perl modules.


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