Perl

A detailed Summary of Perl

Living in an age of technology, the world is constantly coming up with new ways to make our lives easier (or sometimes more complex depending on how you look at it). Now with the help of the open source community, programming languages are blossoming from a small idea of a lonely programmer. Perl, a specialized language invented by Larry Wall, is a language that flourished in the hands of open source contributors.

While working for the National Security Agency on a project known as "Blacker" Larry Wall created Perl. He was trying to produce some reports from a Usenet-news-like hierarchy of files for a bug-reporting system and the language he was using, awk, ran out of steam. He explained Perl's beginnings as follows:

"The Beginnings of Perl were directly inspired by running into a problem I couldn't solve with the tools I had. Or rather, that I couldn't easily solve. As the Apostle Paul so succinctly put it, "All things are possible, but not all things are expedient." I could have solved my problem with awk and shell eventually, but I possess a fortuitous surplus of the three chief virtues of a programmer: Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. I was too lazy to do it in awk because it would have been h

This function will read in every line of the until the end of the file is reached. The data is passed to the sort routine and sorts the data. The return type is determined within the context it is evaluated in.

The Perl data model declares every variable that is not declared as private, as global. The variables may be located anywhere in the context of the program as long as it is declared before it is used. (Ramirez perlsub.html) Subroutines, like variables, can be located anywhere in the main program. It can also be loaded in from a file, or generated on the fly. (Ramirez perlsub.html) Subroutines are named with an initial '&'. (Ramirez perldata.html)

By this point Perl had become much too large for Larry Wall to develop by himself. Several people were hired and given various responsibilities in the continued development and maintenance of Perl. Also at this point, Wall realized that he would have to develop a commercially packaged version of Perl for all the Windows folks. He stated, "Its almost like we're doing Windows users a favor by charging them money for something they could get for free, because they get confused otherwise." So Larry Wall was hired by O'Reilly and Associates to do good things for Perl. Perl has continued to be an open source software package (also available commercially for Windows users) that grows and develops as almost all open-source software projects do.

Perl would not be good for large programs such as operating systems, or critical system programs. The reason for this is that Perl does not have the power that other languages such as JAVA or C++ which allow you to code at a much deeper level. Since it is a completely interpreted language, it is not as fast as a compiled language, a major drawback when speed is a requirement.

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Approximate Word count = 2415
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: Technology