[1] : Virtual Entity of Relevant Acronyms (Version 1.9, June 2002)

perl
     pathologically eclectic rubbish lister slang
     
     

[2] : Virtual Entity of Relevant Acronyms (Version 1.9, June 2002)

perl
     practical extraction and report language perl
     
     

[3] : Jargon File (4.3.1, 29 Jun 2001)

perl /perl/ n. practical extraction and report language, a.k.a.
   pathologically eclectic rubbish lister an interpreted language
   developed by larry wall <>, author of `patch1' and
   `rn1' and distributed over usenet. superficially resembles awk, but
   is much hairier, including many facilities reminiscent of `sed1' and
   shells and a comprehensive unix system-call interface. unix sysadmins,
   who are almost always incorrigible hackers, generally consider it one of
   the languages of choice, and it is by far the most widely used tool
   for making `live' web pages via cgi. perl has been described, in a
   parody of a famous remark about `lex1', as the swiss-army chainsaw
   of unix programming. though perl is very useful, it would be a stretch
   to describe it as pretty or elegant; people who like clean, spare
   design generally prefer python. see also camel book, tmtowtdi.


see also:
awk languages of choice swiss-army chainsaw elegant python camel book 
tmtowtdi 

[4] : The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (27 SEP 03)

perl
     
         a high-level programming language, started
        by larry wall in 1987 and developed as an open source
        project.  it has an eclectic heritage, deriving from the
        ubiquitous c programming language and to a lesser extent
        from sed, awk, various unix shell languages, lisp,
        and at least a dozen other tools and languages.  originally
        developed for unix, it is now available for many
        platforms.
     
        perl's elaborate support for regular expression matching and
        substitution has made it the language of choice for tasks
        involving string manipulation, whether for text or binary
        data.  it is particularly popular for writing cgi scripts.
     
        the language's highly flexible syntax and concise regular
        expression operators, make densely written perl code
        indecipherable to the uninitiated.  the syntax is, however,
        really quite simple and powerful and, once the basics have
        been mastered, a joy to write.
     
        perl's only primitive data type is the "scalar", which can
        hold a number, a string, the undefined value, or a typed
        reference.  perl's aggregate data types are arrays, which
        are ordered lists of scalars indexed by natural numbers,
        and hashes or "associative arrays" which are unordered
        lists of scalars indexed by strings.  a reference can point to
        a scalar, array, hash, function, or filehandle.  objects
        are implemented as references "blessed" with a class name.
        strings in perl are eight-bit clean, including nulls, and
        so can contain binary data.
     
        unlike c but like most lisp dialects, perl internally and
        dynamically handles all memory allocation, garbage
        collection, and type coercion.
     
        perl supports closures, recursive functions, symbols
        with either lexical scope or dynamic scope, nested data
        structures of arbitrary content and complexity as lists or
        hashes of references, and packages which can serve as
        classes, optionally inheriting methods from one or more
        other classes.  there is ongoing work on threads,
        unicode, exceptions, and backtracking.  perl program
        files can contain embedded documentation in pod plain old
        documentation, a simple markup language.
     
        the normal perl distribution contains documentation for the
        language, as well as over a hundred modules program
        libraries.  hundreds more are available from the
        comprehensive perl archive network.  modules are themselves
        generally written in perl, but can be implemented as
        interfaces to code in other languages, typically compiled c.
     
        the free availability of modules for almost any conceivable
        task, as well as the fact that perl offers direct access to
        almost all system calls and places no arbitrary limits on
        data structure size or complexity, has led some to describe
        perl, in a parody of a famous remark about lex, as the
        "swiss army chainsaw" of programming.
     
        the use of perl has grown significantly since its adoption as
        the language of choice of many world-wide web developers.
        cgi interfaces and libraries for perl exist for several
        platforms and perl's speed and flexibility make it well
        suited for form processing and on-the-fly web page creation.
     
        perl programs are generally stored as text source files,
        which are compiled into virtual machine code at run time;
        this, in combination with its rich variety of data types and
        its common use as a glue language, makes perl somewhat hard to
        classify as either a "scripting language" or an
        "applications language" -- see ousterhout's dichotomy.
        perl programs are usually called "perl scripts", if only for
        historical reasons.
     
        version 5 was a major rewrite and enhancement of version 4,
        released sometime before november 1993.  it added real data
        structures by way of "references", un-adorned subroutine
        calls, and method inheritance.
     
        the spelling "perl" is preferred over the older "perl" even
        though some explain the language's name as originating in the
        acronym for "practical extraction and report language".  the
        program that interprets/compiles perl code is called
        "perl", typically "/usr/local/bin/perl" or "/usr/bin/perl".
     
        current version: 5.005_03 stable, 5.005_62 in development, as
        of 1999-12-04.
     
        home http://www.perl.com/.
     
        usenet newsgroups: news:comp.lang.perl.announce,
        news:comp.lang.perl.misc.
     
        "programming perl", larry wall and randal l. schwartz,
        o'reilly  associates, inc.  sebastopol, ca.  isbn
        0-93715-64-1.
     
        "learning perl" by randal l. schwartz, o'reilly  associates,
        inc., sebastopol, ca.
     
        jargon file
     
        1999-12-04
     
     
see also:
high-level larry wall open source c sed awk 
unix shell lisp platforms regular expression 
language of choice string manipulation cgi scripts primitive aggregate 
arrays scalars natural numbers associative arrays function 
filehandle objects blessed class eight-bit clean 
nulls binary data garbage collection coercion closures 
recursive functions symbols lexical scope dynamic scope data structures 
methods threads unicode exceptions backtracking 
pod comprehensive perl archive network system calls lex world-wide web 
cgi web page text source virtual machine 
scripting language applications language ousterhout's dichotomy subroutine method 
inheritance lt;homegt; usenet lt;news:comp.lang.perl.announcegt; lt;news:comp.lang.perl.miscgt; jargon file 

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