Origin of Perl

Perl stands for Practical Extraction and Reporting Language. The name reflects its origin. It is an interpreted language with primarily dynamic typing created by Larry Wall for generating textual reports. He was once rifling through a hierarchy of files with the goal of extracting relevant information by scanning for textual patterns. He was working on a Unix machine and the premier pattern searching and processing tool for Unix machines called awk was not up to the task. So, Mr. Wall, the avid programmer, wrote a tool for achieving his immediate goal and other tasks he had in mind. This was the first version of Perl.

From its humble beginnings, Perl has gone through a large number of revisions and extensions. Perl 1 was released in January 1988, Perl 2 in June 1988, Perl 3 in October 1989, and Perl 4 in March 1991. The currently available major version, Perl 5, was released in October 1994. Perl 6 is in the works as of late 2003. No longer it is a language for pattern matching, but it has developed into a full-fledged language that has excellent facilities for many diverse tasks. Sophisticated handling of regular expressions still remains one of its strong points and it is one reason why Perl is very popular with programmers who create dynamic pages for the World Wide Web (WWW) using the technique called Common Gateway Interface (CGI).