I, BASIC-PLUS, SNOBOL, Lips, Ada, C++, Python and others. Its author claims that Perl leaves out all the unwanted features of these languages and only combines their "cool" ones.
             The first decision was how to optimize Perl. From the very beginning Wall decided Perl should be optimized for the common case. 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.
             The next big question was whether or not to release Perl as open source software. Although Wall believed that open source was good, he wasn't sure what the company lawyers would think. He says, "I knew that I didn't dare ask the [them] for permission, because they'd have thought about it for something like six months, and then told me 'no.' In the old days, a lot of free software was released under the principle that it's much easier to ask forgiveness than to seek permission." So Perl was released to the comp.sources.misc newsgroup in 1987.
             Wall wanted a short name with positive connotations and after looking up every three and four letter word in the dictionary, he decided to use Pearl, short for "Practical Extraction and Report Language." The 'a' was dropped because of the existence of some obscure graphics language with the same name. Perl was adopted, not P.E.R.L. or perl but Perl (which the author has often joked also means "Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister").
             Wall's intentions at the time of releasing Perl were quite simple, he wished to emphasize the Unix philosophy that every tool should do only one thing and do that one thing well. The current problem, Wall thought, with that philosophy was that many of the tools for Unix did not do things very well. They had arbitrary limits and were often slow and non-portable. Thi...