Larry Wall, Perl's creator Perl is sometimes called the "Practical Extraction and Report Language" though it has

been called a "Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister" "perl" with a lowercase p refers to the interpreter that compiles and runs your programs. Larry created Perl in the mid-1980s when he wanted to produce some reports from a Usenet news-like hierarchy of files for a bug-reporting system He needed something with the quickness of coding available in shell or awk progr amming and with some of the power of more advanced tools like grep, cut, sort, a nd sed,[] without having to resort to a language like C. There are few things you can't do with Perl. You wouldn't want to write an inter rupt-microkernel-level device driver in Perl Perl is kind of ugly. This is true. O'Reilly's symbol for Perl is the camel Camels are kind of ugly, too. But they work hard, even in tough conditions. Came ls get the job done despite all difficulties even when they look bad and smell w orse and sometimes spit at you. Perl is a little like that. Perl is a high-level language. That means that the code is dense; a Perl program may be around a quarter to three-quarters as long as the corresponding program in C. This makes Perl faster to write, read, debug, and maintain. It doesn't tak e much programming before you realize that when the entire subroutine is small e nough to fit on-screen all at once Perl can be "write-only" in that it's possible to write programs impossible to r ead Perl is the language for people who want to get work done. It started as a tool for UNIX system administrators who needed something powerful for small tasks. Si nce then, Perl has blossomed into a full-featured programming language used for web programming, database manipulation, XML processing, and system administratio n--on practically all platforms 1.data structures 2.minimal matching 3.threading 4.data parsing 5.references 6.objects 7.modules 8.package implementation It is the workhorse of the Internet, as well as the language of choice for syste m administrators, web hackers, and casual programmers around the world. The webmasters and webmistresses picked Perl as the language of choice for conte nt management, interaction through CGI, and maintenance Perl programs are text files; you can create and edit them with your favorite t ext editor. UltraEdit and Programmer's Favorite Editor (PFE) on Windows. How Do I Compile Perl?

$ perl my_program