What is Perl ?
- Created by Larry Wall in 1987
- Scripting language replacing awk, sed and shell scripts
- Glue language - putting together tools provided for the OS
- Free software distributed under GPL and the Artistic licenses
- Available for most of the platforms (UNIX/Linux/Windows/Macintosh/VMS/main frame/...)
- Generally speaking machine and OS independent but the system calls are OS specific
- Interpreted language compiled to a machine independent byte tree and ...
- ... Executed immediately by the interpreter
- C-like syntax