Specifying Argument Line

Perl is a unique language in ways that cannot be conveyed simply by describing the technical details of the language. Perl is a state of mind as much as a language grammar. Perl means, the Practical Extraction and Report Language. Back in 1986, Larry Wall found himself working on a task which involved generating reports from a lot of text files with cross references. Being a UNIX programmer, and because the problem involved manipulating the contents of text files, he started to use awk for the task. But it soon became clear that awk wasn't up to the job; with no other obvious candidate for the job, held just have to write some code. He invented a new language and wrote an interpreter for it which was called PERL.

The new language had an emphasis on system management and text handling. After a few revisions, it could handle regular expressions, signals, and network sockets, too. It became known as Perl and quickly became popular with frustrated, lazy UNIX programmers. Perl programs bear a passing resemblance to C programs, perhaps because Perl was written in C, or perhaps because Larry found some of its syntactic conventions handy. Perl is free. The full source code and documentation are free to copy, compile, print, and give away. Any programs we write in Perl are ours to do with as we please; there are no royalties to pay and no restrictions on distributing them as far as Perl is concerned.

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