If you are new to programming, you will almost certainly run into a language called Perl. What is this Perl, anyway? Simply put, Perl is a programming language that has been improved over more than 30 years, which makes it very powerful and full of features. But there is a lot more to it than just that.
In this article, we will proceed to give you an adequate overview of the language, covering its history, growth, strengths and more. Let’s dive in.
What is Perl?
What is Perl? This question attracts many in the tech world. Perl is a high-level general-purpose interpreted and dynamic programming language that has revolutionized the programming world. Originally designed for system administration and text processing, Perl has grown to incorporate regular expressions, sockets, and much more.
According to the recent statistics, there are more than 311,070 currently active Perl websites, and 1,351,761 websites that have been created with Perl at some point in time. This data clearly shows that Perl is used on all platforms without exception.
Perl has many advantages and its main strength is its flexibility. It can produce reports, work with text, and even carry out statistical calculations and analysis. For instance, Perl’s Statistics::Basic and Statistics::Descriptive modules contain a set of basic statistical functions.
This shows that Perl is strong especially when it comes to handling of Regular Expressions. This feature when combined with its text processing feature makes perl ideal for tasks such as extracting information from text files and converting them to other formats.
Perl is also used for system administration and here again, it is very practical. In contrast to the usage of several languages, system administrators can perform their tasks in Perl effectively. Furthermore, Perl is used where it can be integrated with web servers to boost their performance.
When it was being made, its ease of use was one of the most important things to think about. Developers can do a lot with only a small amount of code because the system is built in a smart way. It is so useful that people on the internet call it a “Swiss Army chainsaw“
History
The history of Perl began in 1987. Larry Wall, a programmer at Unisys, started working on Perl. His purpose was to design an easily understandable and easily coded language for scanning, extracting, and printing information from text files. Also, Perl could manage many system management tasks.
Perl was first released on December 18, 1987. It was based on the techniques employed by the existing languages for text processing. Perl 2 was released in June 1988 and included a better regular expression engine than the first version.
Perl was not capitalized in its name at the beginning. However, by the time Perl 4 was released, the name was capitalized. Perl 5, a substantial rewrite by Wall, was first released in 1994. It still has backing and updates from the Perl community.
From the year 2000 to October 2019, a sixth version of Perl was under construction. This version was later renamed Raku in 2019. Perl and Raku are still being developed by different teams of developers and are still active languages.
Perl was extended to other operating systems that were not UNIX based, including the Apple Inc.’s Mac OS and Microsoft Corporation’s Windows OS in the 1990s. Nevertheless, Perl continued to be more popular among the UNIX users.
Perl is a high-level, general-purpose programming language today. This is widely used in web development, system administration, network programming, etc. Perl’s open-ended, constantly developing text-manipulating and problem-solving strengths have made it a favorite of the web developers.
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Raku
Raku, previously called Perl 6, is a crucial component of the Perl family’s development. The development of Raku started in the year 2000 which was a new phase in the Perl family tree. Perl creator Larry Wall first unveiled this process at the Perl Conference of that year. The main objectives were to eradicate ‘historical blemishes’ from the language and to simplify that which was difficult.
Raku brings in features of many of the contemporary and past languages. It was not an aim to be compatible with Perl, although a compatibility mode is included in the specification. This deviation from Perl led to the changing of the name of Perl 6 to Raku in October of 2019. The change of name was to remove confusion and to focus on the features of the language in question.
Raku has been used occasionally in the recent past. It comes with its own integrated development environment, Comma and there are several books that have been written on the language. Some of the developers have incorporated Raku in their projects for text processing. However, it is necessary to mention that Raku is not very old and the number of users who apply it is not so large as in the case with other languages.
2020 til Now
Perl has been growing in the last few years in an incredible manner. In 2020, a significant announcement was made: At the same time, the work on the creation of Perl 7 began. This was not a shift in code or syntax but Perl 5 with the settings that are now default. This laid the foundation for further modifications in the future.
Perl 7 in fact is Perl 5. 32, arrived with different, saner, and more modern defaults. The change of the version number to 6 indicated a division between the old and possibly the new Perl. This was a step towards making Perl the “do what I mean” language again where the defaults were probably what you intended to do.
Jumping to the year 2024, the new version of Perl v5.40 was released. This release introduced many improvements. Among the features that could be mentioned were the new CLASS keyword and the
a new field variable attribute, the possibility to use a space in the -M command-line option, the new ^^ logical xor operator, and the try/catch feature is no longer experimental.
For example, the CLASS keyword, like the PACKAGE keyword, was added for the new core OO. It excels when it comes to working with subclasses. The
Another improvement that was included was the addition of an attribute for field variables in class definitions.
These changes to Perl have made it more flexible and strong, thus making it to remain relevant in the current world of languages. Looking to the future the question arises, “What is Perl going to bring next?”.
Usage
Perl is a high level interpreted language and is widely used due to its flexibility. It’s used by 0.1% of all websites. This may not sound like much, but it is a huge number of live websites.
Perl has one major advantage and that is the manipulation of text. Regardless of whether the approach is based on regex or not, Perl is one of the best tools for logfile analysis, text processing, and in-place file modification. For example, it can search CSV files for data fields using regex statements and other kinds of statements. It is also useful as a log file analyzer.
Perl is very Unix-friendly. It can be used as a wrapper for Unix tools and is tightly linked to the OS semantics. Therefore, it shines in pipes, file slurping, inter-process communication, and other such ‘geek’ activities. It can generate Unix daemons or server processes which are invisible and run in the background.
Like npm for Node. js, Perl has a very active development community in CPAN with a huge repository of Perl modules. There is a module for everything you may desire. Most modules are implemented in Perl 5, though some high-performance modules contain an XS part that is implemented in C. With CPAN, you can Perl-ify many databases, including SQLite, MySQL, Postgres, and many more using the database driver (DBD) modules. These translate the DB operations using Perl’s own semantics into unified portable Perl code that is independent of the database.
Perl has arrays, hashes, and references by which you can code in very powerful ways without much concern about data structures or algorithms. Almost all of the modules that you will find in the CPAN are provided with the procedural interface in addition to the object-oriented one.
How It Works
Perl is a high level language and is famous for its text pattern matching capability. It is a scripting language that was originally designed for systems administration and text processing. Perl has grown with time to accommodate regular expressions, network sockets among others. Today Perl is used mostly for Regex (Regular Expressions).
Perl functions in the manner that it interprets the code created by the programmer. It is an interpreted language, which implies that the code is run without compilation, line by line. This feature makes Perl a good tool for prototyping and system administration work.
Another significant aspect of Perl is that it uses packages or modules. These modules, like Statistics::Basic and Statistics::Descriptive, offer a set of very simple statistics modules. They return objects, not numbers, and these objects will be formatted as nicely as any number you could interpolate.
For instance, consider this Perl code snippet:
This code shows the use keyword in Perl which is equivalent to BEGIN { require Mymodule; Mymodule->import(); }. If you are not defining an import routine in your code or you are not extending Exporter then your modules are not importing anything into your Perl script.
Currently, there are 311,070 live websites using Perl, and 1,351,761 websites that were using Perl in the past. This data proves that Perl has been widely applied in bioinformatics, databases, email, games and multimedia, GUI, multi-tasking and networking, QA and testing, telnet/SSH.
Implementation
Exploring the details of the implementation of Perl, one should mention that Perl is an interpreted language. This means that the Perl code you write is not directly executed by the computer but is instead read and executed by a software program: the Perl interpreter which is a program that is used to read and execute Perl scripts.
The Perl interpreter itself is a large program; it is a complex application that is used to run other applications. It is written in C and has been coded to a total of 150000 lines of code. After compilation the size of the interpreter is about 1MB on most system architectures. This may look large, but it is a small price to pay for the power and flexibility that Perl offers.
Notably, Perl has no specification or official grammar. The Perl interpreter is actually the formal specification of Perl itself. This is a quite unique approach which implies that if someone wants to write an another implementation of Perl, he or she would have to study the internals of the existing implementation.
The implementation of Perl has changed with time. The language was first created by Larry Wall in 1987 and has been changed and updated many times since that time. The latest stable release, up to June 2024, is Perl 5. 40. 0.
Perl’s implementation supplies text processing facilities which are not restricted by the data length limits that are characteristic of many modern Unix command line utilities. This makes Perl a very expressive language, meaning that one can write very short source code that at the same time is very compressible.
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The 9 Features of Perl
Perl is a programming language that uses parts of many other languages, like C, awk, sed, sh, and BASIC. The ones on this list are some of the most important.
1. Glue Language
The Glue language is a type of programming language that was made specifically for writing and managing code and programs that connect different pieces of software.
Perl is a glue language that makes it easy for programmers to connect interfaces and parts that wouldn’t normally work together. It comes with a database integration interface that works with third-party databases like MySQL, Oracle, Postgres, Sybase, and others.
2. Interpretation
Perl is an interpreted language, which means that the code you write can be run as is, without having to go through a compilation step, which makes an executable program that is not portable.
In the past, it was the job of the compiler to turn programs into machine code. When you run a Perl program, the code is first turned into a byte code, and then the byte code is turned into machine instructions as the program runs. So, it is not exactly the same as shells or Tcl, which take data literally and don’t use an intermediate representation.
Also, unlike most versions of C and C++, it is not directly compiled into a format that is dependent on the system. It is somewhere in the middle, along with Python, awk, and Emacs.elc files.
3. Shell Scripting
Perl’s set of features was also influenced by the way shell scripts work. For example, you must use leading symbols like the dollar sign ($), the hash sign (#), or the at sign (@). Also, the Shell programming language has a number of useful built-in functions, like the sort command, that can be used right away.
4. Typecasting
Typecasting, which is supported by Perl, can be used to change the data type of an object.
This idea is often shown by the process of “typecasting” a string into a number. For example, if you have a string-to-number typecast, it means that you can do math on a text file with numbers in it by parsing the file and changing the numbers to numeric types instead of text types.
5. Versatile
Perl, among other things, can work with markup languages like HTML and XML.
It also lets you program both in a procedural way and in an object-oriented way at the same time. The language is also known for supporting all kinds of inheritance, polymorphism, and encapsulation, and for putting OOP ideas into practice. Perl is a flexible programming language that can support both procedural programming and object-oriented programming at the same time.
6. Security
Perl is a computer language that is known for how safe it is. According to what Coverity found, there aren’t that many problems with it. To put it another way, it has fewer bugs and holes in its system than other programming languages like Python.
7. Embedding
The Perl interpreter can be used on many different platforms. Perl is a programming language that can be used in both relational databases and web servers.
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8. Text Processing
Perl can work with markup languages like Hypertext Markup Language and Extensible Markup Language because it has text processing features.
9. C’s Features
Most of the parts of Perl’s language came from C, which is another programming language. This category includes components like Statements, Expressions, Control Structures, and Subroutines.
Note that these features are not unique to the C programming language. Instead, they are part of all common programming languages. The language has a lot of C-like features because C is the “mother” language of so many programming languages. Since 1972, C has been known as a reliable way to write code. A lot of modern programming languages, like C++ and Objective C, are built on top of C and use its features.
What is Perl’s Future?
Perl is still very much relevant today. It is particularly effective in text analysis and, therefore, is useful in data analysis for scientists and analysts. Perl is a worthy contender in the field due to the language’s ability to handle large data sets and its fast data manipulation capabilities.
Furthermore, Perl has grown strategies for dealing with the issue of non-blocking programming in the current event-loop-oriented JavaScript, Node. js, and TypeScript. Such flexibility is a good evidence of Perl’s ability to remain relevant in the current programming world.
Social platforms and applications such as DuckDuckGo, Booking.com, and others are developed using Perl. This goes to show that the language is indeed very resilient and can be used in a variety of ways.
Perl is a very active community and there is an almost infinite number of modules available in CPAN. These modules expand the language’s functionality, enabling it to encapsulate numerous databases, including SQLite, MySQL, Postgres, and others, with Perl code through the database driver (DBD) modules.
The Specifics of Learning Perl
Regarding the process of learning Perl, there are several factors that should be taken into account. First of all, it is necessary to note that Perl is a high-level programming language that has expressive and extensible features. It provides strong backing for network and object orientated programming and as such is a valuable tool for almost any kind of application.
Perl is best known for its practicality. It was created for the extraction and reporting purposes, and that is why it is effective in the tasks like writing reports. For example, Perl utilizes a writing format referred to as a ‘format’ to generate reports. This feature enables one to set a format, input the data that is to be displayed on the format and then call on the format.
Learning Perl also means knowing the statistical capabilities of this language. Perl offers modules like Statistics::Basic and PDL::Stats for basic statistical operations. These modules return objects and not just numbers and these objects can interpolate as nicely formatted numbers. This feature makes Perl more useful in data processing and statistical computing.
By July 2024, Perl is implemented as a server-side scripting language on more than 1 million websites. 6 million websites. This widespread usage underlines the necessity to learn Perl in the contemporary world of computing. However, there is information available with the help of external sources such as Perl Market Report that describes the application of Perl in different fields.
Conclusion
Perl is a simple programming language that is still used by a lot of people. Because you don’t have to worry about memory allocation, complex grammar, or data structures, writing code in the Perl program is always a joyful and delightful experience. You only have to do a little extra work to make your code work on more than one operating system. When you know how to use the language, you can make programs that are not only more interesting but also shorter. Also, the source code for it is completely open.
Designveloper‘s readers, what do you think about Perl? Do you think it’s worth reading? Is it worth making a career out of? You have to decide, but as a responsible knowledge partner, we’d say that if a technology has been around for a while, it has definitely done everything it set out to do. Most dotcoms were up and running in the 1990s, and most of them were built with the programming language Perl. If you want to know more about the language or coding in general, check out our other articles or contact us to receive more specific information.
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