Learning Perl, 5th Edition

What Does “Perl” Stand For?

Perl is sometimes called the “Practical Extraction and Report Language,” although it has also been called a “Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister,” among other expansions. It’s actually a backronym, not an acronym, since Larry Wall—Perl’s creator—came up with the name first and the expansion later. That’s why “Perl” isn’t in all caps. There’s no point in arguing which expansion is correct: Larry endorses both.

You may also see “perl” with a lowercase p in some writing. In general, “Perl” with a capital P refers to the language and “perl” with a lowercase p refers to the actual interpreter that compiles and runs your programs.

Why Did Larry Create Perl?

Larry created Perl in the mid-1980s when he was trying to produce some reports from a Usenet news–like hierarchy of files for a bug-reporting system, and awk ran out of steam. Larry, being the lazy programmer that he is,^[*] decided to overkill the problem with a general-purpose tool that he could use in at least one other place. The result was Perl version zero.

Why Didn’t Larry Just Use Some Other Language?

There’s no shortage of computer languages, is there? But, at the time, Larry didn’t see anything that really met his needs. If one of the other languages of today had been available back then, perhaps Larry would have used one of those. He needed something with the quickness of coding available in shell or awk programming, and with some of the power of more advanced tools like grep, cut, sort, and sed ...