Guide Note

Dynamic programming language, Perl, was created by Larry Wall and released in 1987. It is widely adopted because it is an easy to use, easy to learn programming language and its text processing strengths.

Fast Facts

1. Language Debut: 1987
2. Creator: Larry Wall
3. Is cross platform
4. Mascot is the camel

Development on Perl began in 1987, while Larry Wall was a programmer at Unisys. Perl grew rapidly after its initial release. The original name of this programming language was "pearl", but because there is another language with this same name, the language was then changed to "Perl".

The syntax of Perl is almost syntactically the same as C, and like C is a procedural programming language. One of the requirements that must be made though is, you must have the Perl executable and a script file in order to run the program. Perl also features many built-in functions which make it useful for shell programming. Perl also does automatic data typing and memory management.

There is still active development going on with Perl version 5 and version 5.10 was released in December 2007. The next version of Perl, which would be version 6, will be coming out sometime in the future.