Perl

Perl is a programming language designed by Larry Wall in 1987. Perl borrows features from C language, language, shell scripting (sh), awk, sed, Lisp, and, to a lesser extent, many other programming languages.

Structurally, Perl is based on a block like the style of C or AWK, and was widely adopted by his skill in word processing and have no limitations of other scripting languages.

Perl History

Larry Wall began work on Perl in 1987, while working as a programmer at Unisys and released version 1.0 in the newsgroup comp.sources.misc on 18 December 1987. The language expanded rapidly over the next years. Perl 2, released in 1988, featured a better regular expression engine. Perl 3, released in 1989, added support for binary data.

Until 1991 the only documentation for Perl was a single (increasingly lengthy) man page. In 1991 he published Programming Perl (the Camel Book “) and became the de facto reference language. At the same time, the Perl version number was bumped to 4, not to mark a major shift in language, but to identify the version that was documented in the book.

Perl 4 went through a series of maintenance releases, culminating in Perl 4.036 in 1993. At this point, Wall abandoned Perl 4 to begin work on Perl 5. Perl 4 would remain in that version until today.

The development of Perl 5 continued into 1994. The mailing list perl5-porters was established in May 1994 to coordinate work on porting Perl 5 to different platforms. It is the primary forum for development, maintenance and porting of Perl 5.

Perl 5 was released on 17 October 1994. It was almost a complete rewrite of the interpreter and added many new features to the language, including objects, references, packages and modules. Importantly, modules provided a mechanism for extending the language without modifying the interpreter. This allowed to stabilize its core, and allows Perl programmers to add new features.

On 26 October 1995 created the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN). CPAN is a collection of sites that store and distribute Perl sources, binaries, documentation, scripts and modules. Originally, each CPAN site should be accessed through its own URL, today, http://www.cpan.org redirected to one of hundreds of repositories CPAN mirror.

In 2008, Perl 5 continues to be maintained. Important features and some essential buildings have been added, including support Unicode, Threads (threads), an important support for object-oriented programming and other improvements. The latest stable version is released Perl 5.10.0.

Perl – Name

Perl was originally named “Pearl” for the Parable of the Pearl. Larry Wall wanted to give the language a short name with positive connotations; claims that he considered (and rejected) all combinations of three and four letters of the dictionary. He also considered naming it after his wife Gloria. Wall discovered before the official launch that there was already a programming language called Pearl and changed the spelling of the name.

The name is normally capitalized (Perl) when referring to language and sensitive (perl) when referring to the interpreter program itself since Unix file systems are case-sensitive. Before launching the first edition of Programming Perl was common to refer to the language as perl, Randal L. Schwartz, however, forced the name capitalized in the book to stand out better when printed. The award was subsequently adopted by the community.

The name is sometimes described as “PERL” (for Practical Extraction and Report Language – Language Practical Extraction and Report). Although this expansion has prevailed in many current textbooks, including Perl manpage is an officially backronym name means nothing. The spelling of PERL in this case is used as slang for detecting individuals outside the community. However, several retroacrónimos been suggested, including the comedian pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister (accounted for Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish).

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