Perl, the acronym for "Practical Extraction and Report Language" is a high-level general-purpose programming language. It is the brainchild of Larry Wall, who developed this language in 1987. However, Larry continues to develop and maintain this language. Today, Perl is available virtually on every computer platform – from Apple Macintosh to VMS.

Perl is somewhat unique among programming languages. It is optimized for scanning arbitrary text files and system administration. It contains built-in extended regular expression matching and replacement, a dataflow mechanism for providing enhanced security with setuid scripts and is extendable via modules, which can interface to C libraries.

Perl is an interpreted language that is set for string manipulation, I/O, and system tasks. It has built-ins for almost everything of Unix platform, which makes it very popular with system administrators. It incorporates syntax elements from the Bourne shell, csh, awk, sed, grep, and C.

Two types of programmers use Perl. System administrators like it because it bonds the system commands to manipulate data and processes. Its pattern-matching functions help in system searches and reporting. According to the people developing electronic forms for Unix Web servers, Perl is easier to learn and use than C, and for their purposes Perl offers more built-in or publicly available functions such as easy data validation and simple databases.