Free Availability

Perl is a language whose interpreter can be obtained for free. This is because Perl’s author, Larry Wall, wanted Perl to be free from the beginning. Perl’s core modules and documentation have been written by volunteers. It has been ported to many platforms by volunteer programmers. Using the WWW is the simplest way to obtain Perl source code and executables.

Perl’s large number of modules and libraries are also available for free. More modules and libraries are being written all the time. The best way to look for any information on Perl is to visit either of the URLs, http://www.perl.com or http://www.perl.org and start navigating through the linked documents. Another useful site, particularly for Windows systems is http://www.activestate.com where a version of Perl called ActivePerl is available for downloading along with many modules. The Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN, http://www.cpan.org) is a large archive containing source code, ports, documentation, scripts, modules and extensions. The modules available at CPAN are a superset of those available at www.activestate.com. www.perl.org and www.perl.com have links to CPAN which is mirrored in many machines around the world. There are also several USENET newsgroups on Perl. They are comp.lang.perl.misc, comp.lang.perl.modules, comp.lang.perl.tk, comp.lang.perl.announce, and comp.infosystems.www.authoring.cgi, etc.