WARNING: This information has not been updated since October, 1997!

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INDEX ENTRY FOR PERL:
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Name: Perl - Practical Extraction and Report Language

Version: 4.036, 5.004.03

Author(s): Larry Wall <lwall@sems.com>

Ftp source: ftp.funet.fi:/pub/languages/perl/CPAN/src

    CPAN, the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network, is one of the
    best-organized and most widely replicated archive sites on the
    Internet. ftp.funet.fi is the master site, but the automated
    multiplexing service at http://www.perl.com/CPAN can help you connect
    automatically to a nearby CPAN mirror site.

Size on the CD: 12.2 MB (uncompressed)

Description:

   Perl is an interpreted language optimized for scanning arbitrary text
   files, extracting information from those text files, and printing
   reports based on that information.  It's also a good language for many
   system management tasks.  The language is intended to be practical (easy
   to use, efficient, complete) rather than beautiful (tiny, elegant,
   minimal).  It combines (in the author's opinion, anyway) some of the
   best features of C, sed, awk, and sh, so people familiar with those
   languages should have little difficulty with it.  (Language historians
   will also note some vestiges of csh, Pascal, and even BASIC-PLUS.)
   Expression syntax corresponds quite closely to C expression syntax.
   Unlike most Unix utilities, perl does not arbitrarily limit the size of
   your data--if you've got the memory, perl can slurp in your whole file
   as a single string.  Recursion is of unlimited depth.  And the hash
   tables used by associative arrays grow as necessary to prevent degraded
   performance.  Perl uses sophisticated pattern matching techniques to
   scan large amounts of data very quickly.  Although optimized for scan-
   ning text, perl can also deal with binary data, and can make dbm files
   look like associative arrays (where dbm is available).  Setuid perl
   scripts are safer than C programs through a dataflow tracing mechanism
   which prevents many stupid security holes.  If you have a problem that
   would ordinarily use sed or awk or sh, but it exceeds their capabilities
   or must run a little faster, and you don't want to write the silly thing
   in C, then perl may be for you.  There are also translators to turn your
   sed and awk scripts into perl scripts.  OK, enough hype.

   -- Quoted from the manpage by Larry Wall in the perl-4.036 distribution.

Advertised architectures:
  
   Not enumerated, numerous architectures referenced in 
   installation scripts

Prerequisites: C compiler