Welcome -
Welcome to the CGI/Perl Help Forum. My name is Jeffrey Ellison and I will act as moderator. I encourage you to use this forum as often as you like, as the purpose is to help others.
I look forward to responding to your questions and will attempt to give you the best answers available.
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Jeffrey Ellison
<email>[email protected]</email>
<url>http://www.eons.com</url> - Free Online Tools for Webmasters
Jeffrey Ellison posted this at 23:14 — 6th February 1999.
They have: 62 posts
Joined: Dec 1998
What is Perl?
What is Perl?
CGI allows the web server to run other programs. These programs can be anything you can run at a command line while logged in. It can be a C or C++ program, a shell script, or a Perl script. Perl scripts are fairly common, because Perl is such a powerful programming language.
One advantage of using Perl is that you are running an interpreted script, instead of a compiled program. This allows you to make changes and run the script immediatly afterward. A perl script is a text file that is parsed and executed line by line by Perl. It usually ends in a ".pl".
Perl is the Practical Extraction and Report Language, written by Larry Wall. It is sometimes reffered to as the "Swiss Army Chainsaw" because of it's large number of uses and built in tools. System Administrators have used Perl for a long time, so it is not just for the Web. Some features that are desired for the Web are its text processing capablities and built in searching and formatting.
Besides that, it is relativly easy to use. While knowing just a tiny portion of Perl's extensive features, you can accomplish many tedious tasks rather quickly. There are so many built in functions and operators for manipulating data. Sometimes Perl can do in one line what would take many, many lines in C or C++. This allows us to concentrate on getting the main task done, and we do not have to worry about as many nitpicky details. Using many pre-built building blocks, and reusing existing code we can whip up a quick n dirty Perl script for almost any task.
The Perl motto is "there's more than one way to do it!" The thing that matters is the overall effect of your program. Exactly how you chose to do it is up to you. With Perl you can break away from the strict rules and guidlines of programming in C, and can express your artistic imagination and creativity.
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Jeffrey Ellison
[email protected]
www.eons.com - Free Online Tools for Webmasters
[This message has been edited by Jeffrey Ellison (edited February 06, 1999).]
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