V.E.R.A. -- Virtual Entity of Relevant Acronyms (February 2016):

PERL
       Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister (slang)


V.E.R.A. -- Virtual Entity of Relevant Acronyms (February 2016):

PERL
       Practical Extraction and Report Language (PERL)


The Jargon File (version 4.4.7, 29 Dec 2003):

Perl
 /perl/, n.

    [Practical Extraction and Report Language, a.k.a. Pathologically Eclectic
    Rubbish Lister] An interpreted language developed by Larry Wall, author of
    patch(1) and rn(1)). Superficially resembles awk, but is much hairier,
    including many facilities reminiscent of sed(1) and shells and a
    comprehensive Unix system-call interface. Unix sysadmins, who are almost
    always incorrigible hackers, generally consider it one of the languages of
    choice, and it is by far the most widely used tool for making ?live? web
    pages via CGI. Perl has been described, in a parody of a famous remark
    about lex(1), as the Swiss-Army chainsaw of Unix programming. Though Perl
    is very useful, it would be a stretch to describe it as pretty or elegant
    ; people who like clean, spare design generally prefer Python. See also
    Camel Book, TMTOWTDI.


The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (30 December 2018):

Perl

    A high-level programming language, started
   by Larry Wall in 1987 and developed as an open source
   project.  It has an eclectic heritage, deriving from the
   ubiquitous C programming language and to a lesser extent
   from sed, awk, various Unix shell languages, Lisp,
   and at least a dozen other tools and languages.  Originally
   developed for Unix, it is now available for many
   platforms.

   Perl's elaborate support for regular expression matching and
   substitution has made it the language of choice for tasks
   involving string manipulation, whether for text or binary
   data.  It is particularly popular for writing CGI scripts.

   The language's highly flexible syntax and concise regular
   expression operators, make densely written Perl code
   indecipherable to the uninitiated.  The syntax is, however,
   really quite simple and powerful and, once the basics have
   been mastered, a joy to write.

   Perl's only primitive data type is the "scalar", which can
   hold a number, a string, the undefined value, or a typed
   reference.  Perl's aggregate data types are arrays, which
   are ordered lists of scalars indexed by natural numbers,
   and hashes (or "associative arrays") which are unordered
   lists of scalars indexed by strings.  A reference can point to
   a scalar, array, hash, function, or filehandle.  Objects
   are implemented as references "blessed" with a class name.
   Strings in Perl are eight-bit clean, including nulls, and
   so can contain binary data.

   Unlike C but like most Lisp dialects, Perl internally and
   dynamically handles all memory allocation, garbage
   collection, and type coercion.

   Perl supports closures, recursive functions, symbols
   with either lexical scope or dynamic scope, nested data
   structures of arbitrary content and complexity (as lists or
   hashes of references), and packages (which can serve as
   classes, optionally inheriting methods from one or more
   other classes).  There is ongoing work on threads,
   Unicode, exceptions, and backtracking.  Perl program
   files can contain embedded documentation in POD (Plain Old
   Documentation), a simple markup language.

   The normal Perl distribution contains documentation for the
   language, as well as over a hundred modules (program
   libraries).  Hundreds more are available from The
   Comprehensive Perl Archive Network.  Modules are themselves
   generally written in Perl, but can be implemented as
   interfaces to code in other languages, typically compiled C.

   The free availability of modules for almost any conceivable
   task, as well as the fact that Perl offers direct access to
   almost all system calls and places no arbitrary limits on
   data structure size or complexity, has led some to describe
   Perl, in a parody of a famous remark about lex, as the
   "Swiss Army chainsaw" of programming.

   The use of Perl has grown significantly since its adoption as
   the language of choice of many web developers.
   CGI interfaces and libraries for Perl exist for several
   platforms and Perl's speed and flexibility make it well
   suited for form processing and on-the-fly web page creation.

   Perl programs are generally stored as text source files,
   which are compiled into virtual machine code at run time;
   this, in combination with its rich variety of data types and
   its common use as a glue language, makes Perl somewhat hard to
   classify as either a "scripting language" or an
   "applications language" -- see Ousterhout's dichotomy.
   Perl programs are usually called "Perl scripts", if only for
   historical reasons.

   Version 5 was a major rewrite and enhancement of version 4,
   released sometime before November 1993.  It added real data
   structures by way of "references", un-adorned subroutine
   calls, and method inheritance.

   The spelling "Perl" is preferred over the older "PERL" (even
   though some explain the language's name as originating in the
   acronym for "Practical Extraction and Report Language").  The
   program that interprets/compiles Perl code is called
   "perl", typically "/usr/local/bin/perl" or "/usr/bin/perl".

   (http://perl.com/).

   Usenet newsgroups: news:comp.lang.perl.announce,
   news:comp.lang.perl.misc.

   ["Programming Perl", Larry Wall and Randal L. Schwartz,
   O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.  Sebastopol, CA.  ISBN
   0-93715-64-1].

   ["Learning Perl" by Randal L. Schwartz, O'Reilly & Associates,
   Inc., Sebastopol, CA].

   [Jargon File]

   (1999-12-04)