perl

scripting language

Contributed by

Bob Gibson (originally contributed by Jonathan Fischer)

Obtained from

ftp.uu.net:/languages/perl

Restrictions

Artistic License (see the file "Artistic" in the source directory for details)

Description

From the beginning of the manual page...

Perl is an interpreted language optimized for scanning arbitrary text files, extracting information from those text files, and printing reports based on that information. It's also a good language for many system management tasks. The language is intended to be practical (easy to use, efficient, complete) rather than beautiful (tiny, elegant, minimal). It combines (in the author's opinion, anyway) some of the best features of C, sed, awk, and sh, so people familiar with those languages should have little difficulty with it.

Productivity

Also from the manual page... If you have a problem that would ordinarily use sed or awk or sh, but it exceeds their capabilities or must run a little faster, and you don't want to write the silly thing in C, then Perl may be for you.

Safety

Used it. So have thousands of other people.

Work Planned

None

Documentation

Manual page For World Wide Web aficionados, there is a lot of material available from the "North American Perl Archive" at URL="http://www.cis.ufl.edu/perl/". In addition to maintaining a large archive of scripts, this site also provides HTML-ized versions of the Perl man page and FAQ doc.

Verification

Included in the perl distribution is an extensive test suite. This version passes all of the tests except for the one which tests the bigint.pl library package. (The failure is reported to be due to a bug in our C compiler.) For what it's worth, the previously contributed version also failed the same test. There are some sample programs in the "eg" subdirectory of the source directory.