Perl is a programming language mainly used for high level, general purpose, interpreted and dynamic programming.

Perl has some great features which we can say that it has borrowed from other programming language i.e. C, Shell Scripting, AWK, and sed. This language is very good in text processing, easy manipulation of text files, graphics programming, system administration, network programming, application that require database access and CGI.

Some of its features

The structure of Perl is broadly derived from C, as C it is procedural in nature.

It also takes some of the features from shell scripting programming. Many bukitin functions in Perl is same as that in Shell.

Perl takes lists from Lisp, arrays from AWK, regular expression from sed.

It is a interpreted language

Object Oriented

Cross platform

Forgiving nature

Very good in text manipulations.

Extensible set of libraries.

Very popular for web development

And mostly used in bioinformatics.

Advantages of using this language:

Portability: This code is not dependent on any operating system nor any platform.

String processing and regular expression support: mainly as this language is used for web development text processing is mainly used. Regular expression is support is most versatile feature and integrated into this language

CPAN: It is comprehensive Perl Archive Network which contains a good collection of reusable Perl code for many purposes.

Perl is free software which is licensed under Artistic License and GPL. The distributations are available for most Operating systems.It can be compiled from source code on all UNIX platforms

Disadvantages of perl.

It is difficult to create a binary image (exe) from a perl file.

If you use the code (Script) from the CPAN and you want it to run on different computer then, you need to install all the modules on that computer, which can be drag.

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