Perl Programming language history

I was originally written this article for giving presentation to my team mates in 2007. And thought of putting part of it here in my blog. Below are the few facts and features of  this very old programming language.

Perl history and Facts

• Perl was initially developed by Larry Wall in 1987.
• Perl is a open source software licensed under GNU public license
• It was made as a unix scripting language for reporting process.
• Perl is also called as the swiss army chainsaw of programming languages due to its flexible and adaptable nature.
• Perl  2 released in 1988 with better and improved regular exprssion engine
• In 1989, perl 3 was released with added feature of handling binary data streams.
• In 1991, perl reference documentations has been published, it is also called as ‘Camel Book’ and version was renamed to Perl 4.
• Perl interpreter was completely rewritten and released in 1994 as Perl verison 5.
• Perl 5.x version is the most widely used as of now

Perl Features

• Perl is a interpreted and dynamic programming language
• Perl is stable and cross-platform programming language.
• It has inherited the best features from C, Basic and other programming languages.
• Perl supports Unicode character encoding for foreign letters.
• Other interesting feature is, it supports both procedural and object oriented programming.
• Perl is extensible and can be integrated with C and C++.
• Perl is best known for powerful text processing engine.
• And perl was known to be the most popular web programming language until PHP supercedes it.

Probably in my next perl article, I will talk about perl programming basics with few sample code.

Don’t forget to say what do you think about perl, find comment section below to post your comments.