Perl
interpreted programming language first released in 1987
Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Though Perl is not officially an acronym, there are various backronyms in use, including "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language".
Perl was developed by Larry Wall in 1987 as a general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier. Since then, it has undergone many changes and revisions. Perl originally was not capitalized and the name was changed to being capitalized by the time Perl 4 was released. The latest release is Perl 5, first released in 1994. From 2000 to October 2019 a sixth version of Perl was in development; the sixth version's name was changed to Raku. Both languages continue to be developed independently by different development teams which liberally borrow ideas from each other.
Perl borrows features from other programming languages including C, sh, AWK, and sed. It provides text processing facilities without the arbitrary data-length limits of many contemporary Unix command line tools.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Perl” is interpreted programming language first released in 1987. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Perl, interpreted and programming, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q42478. The Library of Congress control number is sh95010633. 2 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1987, 1994, 2000 and 2019.
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This entry incorporates text from “Perl” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.