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Perl

Introduction of Perl – Complete Overview

April 26, 2010 Leave a Comment
perl-introduction

perl-introduction

What is Perl

  1. Perl is a programming language, It’s Object Oriented, simple to learn and very powerful. Perl stand for: “Practical Extraction and Reporting Language”.
  2. Perl is an Interpreted language, so you don’t have to compile it like you do Java, C, C++ etc. For fast development work, that’s a godsend.
  3. Perl is a versatile, powerful programming language used in a variety of disciplines, ranging from system administration to web programming to database manipulation.
  4. Perl is a different language to different people. It is a quick scripting tool for some, and a fully-featured object-oriented language for others.
  5. Perl is used in so many places because Perl is a glue language. A glue language is used to bind things together.
  6. Perl is good at is tying these elements together. Perl can take your database, convert it into a spreadsheet-ready file, and, during the processing, fix the data if you want.
  7. Perl can also take your word processing documents and convert them to HTML for display on the Web.

WHY PERL.

There are a many reasons why Perl is a great language for use in development and general processing.
Following are some of them…

  • Learning: Perl has all the same abilities, data constructs and methods of other languages, and its easier to learn then most. If you understand Perl, you will have far less trouble learning other languages like C, C++, Java, PHP etc then if you were starting from scratch.
  • Interpreted language means less time spent debugging.
  • Mod_perl for CGI work means perl can be as fast as compiled languages without the need to manually compile. mod_perl is an advanced implementation of Perl that runs in the Apache web server. It provides extremely fast performance and full access to Apache internals via Perl.
  • CPAN.org, a massive collection of perl modules that can do almost anything, someone has usually done the work for you. CPAN, the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network, is one of the largest repositories of free code in the world. If you need a particular type of functionality, chances are there are several options on the CPAN, and there are no fees or ongoing costs for using it.
  • Online support. Perl has been around since the early 90’s, its exceptionally well known and thousands of tutorial and help sites abound on the internet. Perl has a very strong user community and this is the primary avenue for support.
  • ISP support. Perl runs on nearly anything, it comes standard on the vast majority of unix/linux servers and is available free for windows servers. As a result its the most commonly supported language on ISP (Internet Service Providers) hosting servers.
  • Text processing. Because perls’ initial reason for living was text processing, its regular expression engine is exceptionally powerful. That means advanced text manipulation is easier then ever. (And let’s face it; nearly all programming is text manipulation of some sort.
  • Database connectivity. Thanks to the DBI module, perl can talk to a great many different databases with the same syntax. That means that you only have to learn one interface to talk to over a dozen different database servers. That’s as opposed to learning each DB’s syntax and commands seperately. Perl provides an excellent interface to nearly all available databases, along with an abstraction layer that allows you to switch databases without re-writing all of our code.
  • Freebies. Since Perl has been around for ages, there are thousands of scripts on the internet that are free to use and/or modify. Perl, Apache, and related technologies are open source and free. On-going overhead cost to vendors for code that continues to run is $0.
  • Multi-platform: Perl runs on Linux, MS Windows and all of the platforms listed here: http://www.cpan.org/ports/external link
  • Rich Community Support: The main point of these stats is that Perl has a large and broad user community. With any technology you choose, you don’t want to be the only one using it. These numbers show that Perl is still widely used for web development, among other things, and the user community is very active.
  • Re-usable code architecture (modules, OO, etc.): Perl is architected to allow and encourage re-use. The core block of re-use, the module, makes it very easy to leverage business logic across platforms in web applications, batch scripts, and all sorts of integration components.
  • Multi-use: Perl can be used to develop Web apps, batch processing, data analysis and text manipulation, command-line utilities and apps, GUI apps.
  • Multi-language integration: can interact with C, C++, Java, etc. from within Perl code.

WHY NOT PERL.

All languages have areas that they excel in, and others that they don’t. Perl is no different. Technically, you could write anything in Perl, even a complete operating system. but that does not mean you should. Its a matter of considering your requirements and deciding on the best language to suit them. Here are some reasons why Perl might not be your best choice:

  • Speed. If for example, you were writing a huge word processer like MS Word or WordPerfect. the sheer size of it would make it extremely slow to compile at runtime. For this you would be much better served by a language like C or C++ where the compilation is done before you run it.

 

Rajesh Kumar
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