Perl or Practical Extraction and Report Language was developed by Larry Wall , around 1987 as a language to handle large amount of data and performing functions on it. Since then Perl has developed capacities in string handling, text processing, networking, and rapid prototyping. It can also handle system management tasks easily. Perl is an interpreted language used for processing text files and generating reports based on the information contained in those text files. Since it is easy to use and efficient it is named to be practical. It is also called Blue language. It is freely available and supported by almost every operating system (Unix, Macintosh, Windows). It is a general purpose programming language. Perl has derived best features from other languages. Its syntax is similar to that of shell programs and C; along with these it has built-in functions of awk, sed, and grep. Hence people who know these languages find no difficulty understanding perl. One can also turn sed and awk scripts into PERL scripts by using translators. A program in PERL is called a PERL Script. At the top of every PERL script is a line: #!/usr/bin/perl where the path to perl.exe is located.



PERL was originally developed for the UNIX and ASCII terminal was the primary input/output device and didn't have native GUI interface. But now, there are Perl extension modules for creating applications with graphical interfaces. The most widely used is Tk, which was originally developed as a graphical toolkit for the Tcl scripting language but was soon ported to PERL.

Perl 5 (released in 1995) is the latest version (5.005) of the PERL language. Perl 5 includes an extension mechanism, by which independent modules can be dynamically loaded into a Perl program. This has led to the development of hundreds of add-in modules. Most of the important modules have become part of the standard Perl distribution; while additional modules are available via the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN).

Perl is the most popular languages for CGI programming on the Web because of its text manipulation capabilities and rapid development cycle. With the advent of WWW visibility of PERL increased rapidly. Since what is being done on the Web deals with text, and hence can be easily handled with a language actually developed for text processing. Regular expressions have given Perl enormous power to perform functions based on patterns that it finds in free form text. For its dominant role in CGI programming it is called the duct tape of Internet. Access to databases is also supported in PERL by a powerful set of database-independent interfaces called DBI. With this DBI package web-database integration has become very easy.

PERL has also become the first choice for biologists and computer scientists. Its ability to recognize and manipulate text patterns is used in biomedical research and data mining. "Bioinformatics" is defined as the use of computers in biological research. Huge amounts of biological data contained in public databases, from the gene sequences analyzed by the Human Genome Project to the log files collected by any large web site, can be easily handled and studied by Perl rather than any other language. A collection of Perl modules for processing data for the life sciences is termed as BioPerl.

Due to its robustness and flexibility along with its parsing and searching features, PERL has become popular choice of many programmers for developing rapid-prototypes of concepts being explored.