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PerlFAQ

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Perl FAQ

Introduction

Welcome to the Perl Frequently Asked Questions page. The Perl FAQ is open for everyone to contribute to, so if you find a mistake or something that is missing please do feel free to make corrections and add new content. For more information, click here.

Non-Perl and Perl Noobie Questions

• What exactly is Perl, and why should I use it?

• Perl is a language created by Larry Wall. The name Perl is not really an acronym, but it is sometimes back-acronymed to Practical Extraction and Reporting Language, or even Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister. It is written mostly as a glue language, taking parts of its syntax from C, Awk, Shell, etc. It is a very powerful and strange yet interesting language in many ways. Because it is a glue language, it can act very powerfully in the form of CGI scripts. While it is true that PHP can get faster execution times (not counting the use of mod_perl), this still doesn't mean that it is always the best choice for a job. Perl is also heavily used in *nix system administration.

• What is with the $#%@&*

• Perl programmers like to curse. No, not really, Perl uses different symbols for different types of data structures. PHP is similar, but not as complex as Perl. At first it feels odd, especially if you come from languages where those characters aren't valid in identifiers, but after a while it's natural. I still sometimes catch myself using them when writting C and C++ code. See section two for more info on these.

• What's with all the Camels!

• Tradition :). O'Reilly books usually have animals on them (there were one or two series that didn't) and in the case of Perl it was a camel. Hence, Perl has always been associated with a camel since then. "Programming Perl" came with a camel on it, so it is often referred to as the Camel book. The "Learning Perl" book by Randal Schwartz has a llama on the front, so it is often called the Llama book. Perl Monks has a nice piece of obfuscated code of self replicating camel.

Common Problems

• When I upload a Perl script to my web server that I know works, it won't run. Why?
• How do I use PPM?
• Perl Database Interactivity Using DBI

Clueless book publishers and people new to Perl sometimes call it "PERL". This is incorrect. Perl is the language, perl is the interpreter (note case). A common saying in the Perl community is "Only perl can parse Perl", meaning that the only program that can correctly interpret code written in the Perl language is the Perl interpreter, which on *nix systems is named perl (all lowercase).

The canonical FAQ for any version of Perl is automatically included when you install Perl on your computer. The FAQ for a recent version of Perl can be found at the Perldoc site.
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