What is Perl and what can it do?

Perl is a family of general-purpose programming languages originally designed for report processing and easy manipulation of text files.

Perl has been designed to allow programmers to write programs quicker and easier than previous languages.  It is also ideal as a ‘glue language’, tying together systems and interfaces that were not designed to interoperate.

Perl has primarily been used to write CGI scripts – scripts that create dynamic content in web pages and applications.  For example, an email form on a website may use a Perl script to take the information supplied in the fields and email it to your email address, while also taking the user to a new page after having clicked the ‘Submit’ button.

You can read more about Perl on the Perl.org website: www.perl.org