Perl history
The Perl programming language was developed by a fellow named Larry Wall (a true internet legend) while working in a NASA lab. The first version was in late 1987. Therefore, it is a very mature language and still widely used, here to stay.Perl was written in C language.
The initial purpose is curious, Perl was conceived as a kind of glue (Internet glue), to unite several tools of different languages and different technologies, used by Larry and his colleagues. That is, Perl was born as a 'breaker' originally.
Although it was created decades ago, its development continues in full swing, always improving and evolving, with the help of thousands of people around the planet contributing freely and spontaneously, as it is completely free and free.
We will work here with the latest version, Perl 5.
The name Perl came from the initials:
Practical Extraction and Report Language
Why learn to program in Perl ?
There are a hundred programming languages out there, but why study and program in Perl?What are the advantages? Worth it ?
First of all, we should make it clear that Perl is a very simple, straightforward language, quite easy to learn and absurdly flexible.
It focus is human understanding when it comes to creating the code. Unlike other languages, the focus is not on the machine, but on the programmer.
It is worth mentioning that it is completely free and free. Free to modify, distribute.
Perl is cross-platform, meaning that scripts run on both Unix systems (such as Linux), such as Mac and Windows, and the portability is quite interesting.
It is a language widely used to work with texts, through regular expressions (which we will study well in detail in the future), and the extraction of data and information is its strong point.
Where Perl is used ?
System and network administrators simply love Perl, he's a tremendous useful.With very little code, you can manage a computer network in a very practical and simple way.
Perl is also widely used for CGI programming in the dynamic generation of web pages. There is Perl all over the hole and corner of the Internet, believe me.
Its focus, however, is the manipulation of data and information of various types, mainly textual. We'll see that with Perl you can do miraculous things, mess with millions of things with very little code and in a very easy way. This is very important when dealing with Linux files for example, or with Windows registries.
Computer Language and Programming
Before we go into detail in studying the Perl language, let's take a brush on some important subjects.Throughout our Perl course, we will write code, which is nothing more than machine-specific commands to do what we want.
Obviously, it doesn't understand our language or Perl language.
As well?
You may have heard that computing is all 0 and 1, and indeed it is (actually it has to do with voltage). This is the only 'language' that the machine, the hardware understands.
So what we are going to do is write code that human understands (so-called source code) and use some little program to translate it into machine language, 0 and 1. This process, quite briefly, is compilation or interpretation, and usually results in an executable file such as the Windows .exe
When we do the compilation process, as in the C language, the compiler and other tools turn our source code into machine code, for her to understand. After that, just run the executable, once it was compiled and created, we don't need to repeat this process.
Already in interpreted languages, it is necessary that a program called interpreter always come to intercede for our blessed codes. In this type of process, perl (lower case p is a program) will interpret and run command by command of your script (coded text).
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