What is Perl?Perl is a programming language referred as Practical Extraction and Reporting Language written by Larry Wall. It was written with a motto TMTOWTDI i.e.
There’s More Than One Way To Do It.
Perl Properties
- Interpreted Language
- “Object-Oriented”
- Cross-platform
- Extensible, rich set of libraries
- Used for Web Programming
What do you need?
- Active state Perl or any other standard Perl interpreter
- Any text editor such as notepad
You can download Perl installer from ActiveState download website, you will get a list of installers there, download installer for windows.
Install ActiveState Perl, it does not takes much, simply double click on msi installer file and it will guide you through the rest of installation process.
Now that your installation is over simply go to windows command prompt and do the following
You should get the result as below
(with 50 registered patches, see perl -V for more detail)
If you get these lines on command prompt, it means that Perl is successfully installed on your machine.
My First program
Just open your favorite editor and type the following lines
print “Hell World this is my first program”;
Your hello world program is ready save it as “helloworld.pl” in any directory you feel like.
Go to command prompt and change the current directory to directory where you have saved your “helloworld.pl” and type on command line
You will get output as:
Key things to notice:
- Everything that starts with a hash is a comment in perl
- Perl statement ends with a semicolon
Perl is a lot more than this hello world program, this was just to give you taste of Perl.
I will be back soon with more elaborate articles on Perl, please keep checking this place.