Perl why

Gartner's list of main app development technologies is. Cost Perl, Apache, and related technologies are open source and free. Open Source You can look in and modify perl modules.

You can look in and modify perl itself. Perl has a very strong user community and this is the primary avenue for support. You can purchase support or consulting from multiple sources because any qualified Perl coder can look in the code and investigate problems. Active development Perl continues to be actively developed. This simple operation is quick and simple, and can be run on any machine with Perl.

You can dig through logs much quicker and more effectively with Perl as well. This log has a lot of useless lines which are just noise when hunting bugs. We just run:. By using this method, we can deduce that our issue is a missing semicolon or similar on line Despite the snark that Perl is a write only language, it might as well be so for me with the number of things I throw at one-liners. I write as many projects as I can with Perl, but the glue it provides ends up showing up enough in my standard computing that it outclasses my programming on many fronts.

The Perl regular expression engine is insanely powerful. It is actually practical to write a basic parser when the rules are relatively predictable. Languages like Lua have regular expressions, but their implementation looks like the first lesson of a full course for Perl, and Lua is considered decently powerful on this front. Perl is an interpreted language, which means that your code can be run as is, without a compilation stage that creates a non portable executable program. Traditional compilers convert programs into machine language.

When you run a Perl program, it's first compiled into a byte code, which is then converted as the program runs into machine instructions. So it is not quite the same as shells, or Tcl, which are strictly interpreted without an intermediate representation. Learn more. Ask Question. Asked 1 year, 1 month ago. Active 1 year, 1 month ago. Viewed 90 times. How exactly could this feature which is now unexisting be abused? Improve this question. I've seen it used near the splitting a line of a simple comma-separated value file, so that the array indexes in code "match" those in documentation of the file format, rather than counting from zero and being "all off by one".

Also seen unshift used to address the same perceived problem. This feature can be used to abuse expectations what a specific code does. Changing the behavior of a local code as a side effect of an invisible global variable not used in this code is usually completely unexpected.