Perl Facts

• Perl  scripting is a stable, cross platform programming language.
• Perl hosting is used for mission critical projects in the public and private sectors.
• Perl is open source software, license under its artistic, or the GNE General Public License.
• Perl was created by Larry Wall.
• Perl scripting 1.0 was released to usenet's alt.comp.sources in 1987
• PC Magazine named Perl a finalist for its 1998 Technical Excellence Award in the Development Tool category.
• Perl is listed in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Supported Operating Systems

• Unix systems
• Macintosh - (OS 7-9 and X) see
• Windows
• VMS

Perl Features

• Perl scripting takes the best features from other languages, such as C, awk, sed, sh, and BASIC, among others.
• Perls database integration interface (DB) supports third-party databases including Oracle, Sybase, Postgres, MySQL and others.
• Perl hosting works with HTML, XML, and other mark-up languages.
• Perl supports Unicode
• Perl is Y2K compliant.
• Perl hosting supports both procedural and object-oriented programming.
• Perl interfaces with external C/C++ libraries through XS or SWIG.
• Perl is extensible. There are over 500 third party modules available from the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network
• The Perl scripting interpreter can be embedded into other systems.

Perl and the Web

• Perl scripting is the most popular web programming language due to its text manipulation capabilities and rapid development cycle.
• Perl is widely known as the duct tape of the internet.
• Perl's CGI.pm module, part of Perl's standard distribution, makes handling HTML forms simple.
• Perl hosting can handle encrypted Web data, including e-commerce transactions.
• Perl can be embedded into web servers to speed up processing by as much as 2000%.
• mod Perl scripting allows the Apache web server to embed a Perl interpreter.
• Perl's DBI package makes web-database integration easy.