Does anyone use Perl?

I would say they are being backwards, as much as naive. Perl is VERY powerfull langauge. More so then PHP or ASP could ever hope to be, and there is a reason for it. Perl is a really a shell language, meaning it is ment for running direct as script to influence the system.

PHP, ASP, CFM, etc. are web scripting languages designed for the internet. They are normally more effcient in the web processing. However Perl can afford you nearly all (I would venture to say EVERY) feature PHP can offer you. However to get to the same end result requires more work, and Perl is a little bit more pickey with its systax and errors. You will get 500 server errors more then a nice little Error on line 456 unexpect $, but you still get those too .

It isnt a bad thing to have just Perl, but it is not a great thing. In this case if you are desinging/coding for the client I would inform them that this may hurt their costs more so then giving up the hosting and putting it where a web scripting language is available, one like PHP.

I would agree that Perl is more powerfull than ASP alone. But when you start utilizing DLL's with your ASP, watch out... it'll be a close race.

Ah, I understand - thanks for that, is the syntax for Perl similair to PHP? I've done PHP - but hardly looked at Perl!

PHP can interact with the shell of the host system - Is Perl more suitable for this kind of operation because it includes functions from the host system in its own library?

Cheers!

[EDIT]
Mark, wouldn't loading COM components via an ASP script be an overhead Perl wouldn't have?

Hmm.. this isn't something I've done myself. A coworker of mine (almost 3 years ago) used to compile his code and use it that way.

Being compiled, it runs much quicker. My guess would be that it would depend on the number of components you're loading and the ratio between compiled and interpreted. The more that is compiled, the greater the benifit.

Sorry Mark I was being unclear

I was talking about the way ASP has to use COM components for many tasks (e.g. ADO for database access). Since this is built-in to the Perl libraries (and therefore loaded at the same time as Perl itself) there is no COM overhead; so Perl will always have the advantage of being faster.

the problem with dll is that they are compiled so code maintenance is harder as is debuging. Plus you need tools to compile it suppose you're customer find a bug when youre not close to one of your pc with perl you could use notepad to solve the probleme with dll you absolutly need a vb or c compiler (And i don't say nothing about the cost of those software)

Thanks for all the help guys...Think i have a rough idea of the differences between simple scripting and Perl now, cheers!

perl was meant to be a scripting language to compliment and streamline network administration and sys administration.

with each revision it becomes more powerful, versatile, and useful.
while a scripting language at it's base, it can be used in place of a programming language if needed, and due to it's use in cgi, in place of php or asp as a dynamic page handler.

i only onw one person that uses it like that. i use it as it was originally meant, to write scripts to do the network/sysadmin stuff

How strange that this hosting only comes with Perl, I would imagine people would prefer to have dynamic pages as opposed to sys admin scripting...Makes no sense - but then this is British Telecom we're talking about here

lol. perl is very useful in cgi. like i said, it was made for sys admin, but wsa so powerful it can be used as a strict programmming lang among other things. part of it's strength is the extreme versatility