Wikipedia
Perl
| turing-complete Yes
| typing Dynamic
| influenced_by AWK, Smalltalk 80, Lisp, C, C++, sed, Unix shell, influenced [[Python (programming language)|Python, PHP, Ruby, ECMAScript, Dao, Windows PowerShell, JavaScript, programming_language [[C (programming language)|C
| operating_system license [[GNU General Public License, Artistic License
| website http://www.perl.org/
}}
Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Perl was originally developed by Larry Wall, a linguist working as a systems administrator for NASA, in 1987, as a general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier. Since then, it has undergone many changes and revisions and become widely popular amongst programmers. Larry Wall continues to oversee development of the core language, and its upcoming version, Perl 6.
Perl borrows features from other programming languages including C, shell scripting (sh), AWK, and sed."perltimeline"> The language provides powerful text processing facilities without the arbitrary data length limits of many contemporary Unix tools,"programmingperl"> facilitating easy manipulation of text files. It is also used for graphics programming, system administration, network programming, applications that require database access and CGI programming on the Web. Perl is nicknamed "the Swiss Army chainsaw of programming languages" due to its flexibility and adaptability.
History
Early Perl Versions
Larry Wall began work on Perl in 1987, while working as a programmer at Unisys,"larry-wall-snippet"> and released version 1.0 to the comp.sources.misc newsgroup on December 18, 1987. The language expanded rapidly over the next few years.
Perl 2, released in 1988, featured a better regular expression engine. Perl 3, released in 1989, added support for binary data streams.
read more at » http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl