engleză
Perl was originally written by Larry Wall while he was working at NASA s Jet Propulsion Labs. Larry is an Internet legend, known not just for Perl, but as the author of the UNIX utilities rn, one of the original Usenet newsreaders, and patch, a tremendously useful tool that takes a list of differences between two files and allows you to turn one into the other. The term patch used for this activity is now widespread. Perl started life as a glue language for Larry and his officemates, allowing one to stick different tools together by converting between their various data formats. It pulled together the best features of several languages: the powerful regular expressions from sed (the Unix stream editor), the patte- scanning language awk, and a few other languages and utilities. The syntax was further made up out of C, Pascal, Basic, Unix shell languages, English, and maybe a few other elements along the way. While Perl started its life as glue, it is now more often likened to another handy multiuse tool: duct tape. A common statement heard in cyberspace is that Perl is the duct tape that holds the Internet together.
