Description:

Perl, a high-level programming language written by Larry Wall (and thousands of others), has as its ancestors C, sed, awk, the Unix shell. It incorporates the best features of its forbearers to create a language used widely on projects in both the public and private sector.

License Notes:

Perl is disjunctively licensed under a choice of the GNU General Public License version 1, or (at your option) any later version, or the Artistic License version 1.0. See http://dev.perl.org/licenses/ for more license information.

Usage Notes:

Perl's process, file, and text manipulation facilities make it particularly well-suited for tasks involving the following:

• Quick prototyping.
• System utilities.
• Software tools.
• System management tasks.
• Database access.
• Graphical programming.
• Networking.
• Web programming.

The strength of these capabilities make it especially popular with system administrators and CGI script authors, but developers in disciplines as varied as genetics and journalism find Perl useful.