Perl (2355/per004)

 Camel

Pattern-based string manipulation 

Practical Extraction and Report Language. Larry Wall An AWK-like interpreted language for scanning text and printing formatted reports. Regular expression primitives, dynamically- scoped variables and functions, extensible runtime libraries, exception handling, packages. Version 5 adds nested data structures and object- oriented features.

(Practical Extraction and Report Language) or fondly as (Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister) an interpreted language optimized for scanning arbitrary text files, extracting information from those files, and printing reports based on that information, for writing CGI programs, for automating routines, on the server end, and "a million other things". It has been described as the "Swiss Army Chainsaw" of Unix programming. It's motto might be, "include everything that might help anyone, and to allow many ways to do anything".  Though Perl is very useful, it would be a stretch to describe it as pretty or elegant. People who like a clean, spare design usually like Python.  Perl 5 provides the additional benefits: simplified grammar - the new yacc grammar is one half the size of the old one, lexical scoping, arbitrarly nested data structures, modularity and reusability, OO, embeddable and extensible, POSIX compliant, package destructors and constructors, multiple simultaneous DBM implementations, regular expression enhancements, and subroutinues that can now be autoloaded.  http://www.perl.com  http://www.cpan.org

Structures:
Related languages
AWK => Perl   Derivation of
SED => Perl   Derivation of
Perl => D4   Adaptation of
References:
  • Larry Wall et al "Programming Perl". O'Reilly & Assocs. view details
  • Library of Congress Subject Headings P33 view details
    Resources