What is Perl ?

#what_is_perl

Perl is a family of two high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming languages. “Perl” refers to Perl 5, but from 2000 to 2019 it also referred to its redesigned “sister language”, Perl 6, before the latter’s name was officially changed to Raku in October 2019. Wikipedia

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.

• Though Perl is not officially an acronym but few people used it as Practical Extraction and Report Language. #perl_acronym

• Perl is an Open Source software, licensed under its Artistic License, or the GNU General Public License (GPL). #perl_license

[https://www.tutorialspoint.com/perl/perl_introduction.htm]

It was developed by Larry Wall, in 1987.

 

Installing Perl

perl installation  install perl

Go to https://cpan.org/

Install on Linux

Go to https://cpan.org/ –> click on Perl Source tab -> download the tar file for the highlighted version.

How to install from source

     wget https://www.cpan.org/src/5.0/perl-5.36.0.tar.gz
     tar -xvf perl-5.36.0.tar.gz
     cd perl-5.36.0
     ./Configure -des -Dprefix=$HOME/localperl
     make
     make test
     make install

To use this version of perl, you need to add the directory to the PATH environment variable.

Check perl version :

perl -v

First perl program

#perl_helloworld perl hello

Perl is interpreted

#perl_interpreted perl interpret

Perl is an interpreted language, which means that your code can be run as is, without a compilation stage that creates a non portable executable program.

However, when you run a Perl program, it’s first compiled into a byte code, which is then converted ( as the program runs) into machine instructions.

So it is not quite the same as shells, or Tcl, which are strictly interpreted without an intermediate representation.

It is also not like most versions of C or C++, which are compiled directly into a machine dependent format. It is somewhere in between, along with Python and awk and Emacs .elc files.