PERL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PERL Overview The perlintro(1) man page says: Perl is a general-purpose programming language originally developed for text manipulation and now used for a wide range of tasks including system administration, web development, network programming, GUI development, and more. The language is intended to be practical (easy to use, efficient, complete) rather than beautiful (tiny, elegant, minimal). Its major features are that it's easy to use, supports both procedural and object-oriented (OO) programming, has powerful built-in support for text processing, and has one of the world's most impressive collections of third-party modules. Language features The overall structure of Perl derives broadly from C. Perl is a procedural programming language, with variables, expressions, assignment statements, brace-delimited code blocks, control structures, and subroutines. Perl also takes features from shell programming. Perl programs are interpreted. All variables are marked with leading sigils. Sigils unambiguously identify variable names, thus allowing Perl to have a rich syntax. Importantly, sigils allow variables to be interpolated directly into strings. Like the Unix shells, Perl has many built-in functions for common tasks, like sorting, and for accessing system facilities. Perl takes associative arrays from awk and regular expressions from sed. These simplify and facilitate all manner of parsing, text handling, and data management tasks. In Perl 5, features were added that support complex data structures, first-class functions (i.e. closures as values), and an object oriented programming model. These include references, packages, and class-based method dispatch. Perl 5 also saw the introduction of lexically scoped variables, which make it easier to write robust code, and modules, which make it practical to write and distribute libraries of Perl code. All versions of Perl do automatic data typing and memory management. The interpreter knows the type and storage requirements of every data object in the program; it allocates and frees storage for them as necessary. Legal type conversions are done automatically at run time; illegal type conversions are fatal errors. And more.... continue reading at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PERL ---------- 21-7-2005 Daniel Clemente Laboreo. ( Testing dislines ) http://www.danielclemente.com/dislines/