Perl

Living in an age of technology, the world is constantly coming up with new ways to make our lives easier (or sometimes more complex depending on how you look at it). Now with the help of the open source community, programming languages are blossoming from a small idea of a lonely programmer. Perl, a specialized language invented by Larry Wall, is a language that flourished in the hands of open source contributors.

While working for the National Security Agency on a project known as “Blacker” Larry Wall created Perl. He was trying to produce some reports from a Usenet-news-like hierarchy of files for a bug-reporting system and the language he was using, awk, ran out of steam. He explained Perl’s beginnings as follows:

“The Beginnings of Perl were directly inspired by running into a problem I couldn’t solve with the tools I had. Or rather, that I couldn’t easily solve. As the Apostle Paul so succinctly put it, “All things are possible, but not all things are expedient.” I could have solved my problem with awk and shell eventually, but I possess a fortuitous surplus of the three chief virtues of a programmer: Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. I was too lazy to do it in awk because it would have been h

. . .

View the whole essay, without interruption

The variables may be located anywhere in the context of the program as long as it is declared before it is used. A subroutine will also pass back the value of the last expression evaluated. ” So Larry Wall was hired by O’Reilly and Associates to do good things for Perl. He decided to use built-in floating point operations as they were just being standardized by the IEEE and he fixed Perl’s regular expression syntax to work for the common case first and fastest. Although Wall believed that open source was good, he wasn’t sure what the company lawyers would think. html)

Name Spaces

Perl sets up a new namespace for each variable type. html) An example would be that if the left hand side was a scalar, it would evaluate the right hand side as a scalar regardless of what type it actually is. Perl itself was created and continues evolving by combining features from C, sh, csh, grep, sed, awk, Fortran, COBOL, PL/I, BASIC-PLUS, SNOBOL, Lips, Ada, C++, Python and others. But appearances can be deceiving, and a camel is well adapted to its ecological niche. Wall also believed in the axiom that there is always more than one way to do something. Wall focused more on ease of use and efficiency rather than good looks. You don’t need tracks or roadways, or pipes to other processes.

Approximate Word count = 2415
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page double spaced)

Simply subscribe to view this paper, and 100,000 others.