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Perl (Practical Extraction and Report Language) |
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This is the JargonFile (V4.00) entry for Perl - Next: person of no account, Prev: perfect programmer syndrome |
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Perl is a language optimized for scanning arbitrary text files, extracting information from those text files, and printing reports based on that information. It's also a good language for many system management tasks. The language is intended to be practical (easy to use, efficient, complete) rather than beautiful (tiny, elegant, minimal). |
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:Perl: /perl/ /n./ [Practical Extraction and Report Language, a.k.a. Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister] An interpreted language developed by Larry Wall (<lwall@jpl.nasa.gov>, author of patch(1) and rn(1)) and distributed over Usenet. Superficially resembles awk, but is much hairier, including many facilities reminiscent of sed(1) and shells and a comprehensive Unix system-call interface. Unix sysadmins, who are almost always incorrigible hackers, increasingly consider it one of the languages of choice. Perl has been described, in a parody of a famous remark about lex(1), as the "Swiss-Army chainsaw" of Unix programming. See also Camel Book. |
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* (text is auto-included via JargonExtension by mutante using jargon with VERSION 4.0.0, 24 JUL 1996 - JargonFile by Eric S. Raymond is in the public domain) |
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Perl combines (in the author's opinion, anyway) some of the best features of [[C]], [[sed]], [[awk]], and [[sh]], so people familiar with those languages should have little difficulty with it. |
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Perl is designed to assist the programmer with common tasks that are probably too heavy or too portability-sensitive for the shell, and yet too weird or short-lived or complicated to code in [[C]] or some other [[UNIX]] glue language. |
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Once you become familiar with Perl, you may find yourself spending less time trying to get shell quoting (or [[C]] declarations) right, and more time reading Usenet news and downhill snowboarding, because Perl is a great tool for leverage. Perl's powerful constructs allow you to create (with minimal fuss) some very cool one-up solutions or general tools. Also, you can drag those tools along to your next job, because Perl is highly portable and readily available, so you'll have even more time there to read Usenet news and annoy your friends at [[karaoke]] bars. |
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Like any language, Perl can be "write-only"; it's possible to write programs that are impossible to read. But with proper care, you can avoid this common accusation. Yes, sometimes Perl looks like line noise to the uninitiated, but to the seasoned Perl programmer, it looks like checksummed line noise with a mission in life. If you follow the guidelines of this book, your programs should be easy to read and easy to maintain, but they probably won't win any obfuscated Perl contests. |
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* http://www.gnu.org/software/perl/perl.html |
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See also: |
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* [[Perl/1_liners]] Use perl from your command line |
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* [[Perl/FileFunctions]] |
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---- |
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(extract from O'Reilly |
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Latest revision as of 11:13, 20 November 2007
<jargon />
This is the JargonFile (V4.00) entry for Perl - Next: person of no account, Prev: perfect programmer syndrome
- Perl: /perl/ /n./ [Practical Extraction and Report Language, a.k.a. Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister] An interpreted language developed by Larry Wall (<lwall@jpl.nasa.gov>, author of patch(1) and rn(1)) and distributed over Usenet. Superficially resembles awk, but is much hairier, including many facilities reminiscent of sed(1) and shells and a comprehensive Unix system-call interface. Unix sysadmins, who are almost always incorrigible hackers, increasingly consider it one of the languages of choice. Perl has been described, in a parody of a famous remark about lex(1), as the "Swiss-Army chainsaw" of Unix programming. See also Camel Book.
- (text is auto-included via JargonExtension by mutante using jargon with VERSION 4.0.0, 24 JUL 1996 - JargonFile by Eric S. Raymond is in the public domain)