Perl


 * Perl** is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. It was originally by Larry Wall in 1987 as a general purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier.

PERL = //Practical Extraction and Report Language//

Perl borrows features from other programming languages including C, shell scripting (sh), AWK, sed and Lisp. It is nicknamed the Swiss Army Knife of programming because of its flexibility and adaptability. Perl is used for mission critical projects in the **public** and **private** sectors.
 * Use:**

Perl was updated to Perl 2 in 1988 and then to Perl 3 again in 1989. In 1991 the book //Programming Perl// was released. At the same time the version number of Perl was bumped up to 4. Perl 4 went through many maintenance releases culminating in Perl 4.036 in 1993. Wall abandoned Perl 4 at that time and began work on Perl 5. Perl 5 was released on Oct. 17, 1994. As of right now, Perl 5 **is still actively maintained and used**. On Dec. 18, 2007, the 20th Anniversay of Perl 1.0, Perl 5.10.0 was released and included many new features. Perl 6 is currently in the works. Perl 6 started its development in 2000 and has no scheduled release yet.
 * History:**

Perl:** print "Hello, world!\n"; package Hello; sub new { bless {} } sub Hello { print "Hello, world! \n" } package main; my $hello = new Hello; $hello->Hello;
 * Example:
 * (This is the first example in Learning Perl; the semicolon is optional.)**
 * or:**


 * Fun Facts:**
 * PC Magazine named Perl a finalist for its 1998 Technical Excellence Award in the Development Tool category.
 * Perl is listed in the Oxford English Dictionary.


 * Sources:**
 * http://www.perl.org/about.html
 * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl
 * http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Transwiki:List_of_hello_world_programs