perl

[jroth@xxxxxxxx (Joel Roth)]

chet.gottfried@xxxxxxxx wrote:

> How 'bout more of a description of perl?

It's a very popular interpreted language originally written under
Unix by Larry Wall.

It combines the functions of many Unix utilities such as sed,
awk, and shell scripts. It supports subroutines and recursion,
mathematical functions, and regular expressions (pattern
matching). There are also functions for generating formatted
reports. Perl has many similarities to C.

You write scripts, which the interpreter interprets and executes
at run time. Nevertheless, it is fast enough for application
programs, and has optimizations so that pattern matching and
search-and-replace functions in particular, are very fast.

It has been ported to DOS, OS/2, VMS, and most operating systems.

If you look at the Unix section of your local bookstore, you can
find Programming Perl, one of the Nutshell Handbooks by O'Reilly
that introduces it quite well.

I'm reluctant to try to say much more, because I lack the skills
to succintly describe its many features.

--
Joel Roth