Perl

Perl is a dynamic programming language created by Larry Wall and first released in 1987. Perl borrows features from a variety of other languages, including C, shell scripting (sh), AWK, sed and Lisp.

Structurally, Perl is based on the brace-delimited block style of AWK and C, and was widely adopted for its strengths in string processing, and lack of the arbitrary limitations of many scripting languages at the time.

Syntax

Hello World

#!/usr/bin/perl

print "Hello, world!\n";

Analysis of the example

The #!/usr/bin/perl line (called the hash-bang or shebang line) is only useful for Unix-like systems, as this tells the operating system to execute this file with the Perl binary located at /usr/bin.

print "Hello world!\n"; prints Hello world! and a new line (\n) to STDOUT (standard ouput). The trailing semicolon is the end of statement marker in Perl.

External links

• Perl.org - Official Perl website