Learning Perl 🐪

Welcome to my Perl Learning Repository! This is where I document my journey as I dive into the Perl programming language, often referred to as the "Swiss Army knife" of scripting languages.

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History

PERL, short for Practical Extraction and Reporting Language, was created by Larry Wall in 1987. Wall designed PERL to bridge the gap between shell scripting and higher-level programming languages like C. At the time, existing tools like awk and sed were limited in functionality, and Wall sought to create a versatile tool for text processing, file manipulation, and reporting.

PERL was inspired by multiple languages:

• C for its control structures and performance.
• Shell scripting for its ease of text processing.
• AWK and SED for their pattern-matching capabilities.

Key milestones in PERL’s history include:

• PERL 1.0 (1987): The initial release, focused on text processing and system management.
• PERL 5 (1994): A major rewrite introducing object-oriented programming, modules, and references.
• Raku (formerly Perl 6): Announced in 2000 as a sister language with modern features, though it evolved separately from PERL 5 and officially became "Raku" in 2019.

PERL’s slogan, "There’s More Than One Way To Do It" (TMTOWTDI), embodies its philosophy of flexibility and creativity, empowering developers to solve problems in diverse ways.

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Domain and Paradigm

PERL is a general-purpose programming language with multiple paradigms:

Imperative Programming

PERL enables step-by-step execution with statements and control structures, much like C.

Example:

my $sum = 0;
for (my $i = 1; $i <= 10; $i++) {
    $sum += $i;
}
print "Sum of first 10 numbers: $sum
";

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Procedural Programming

Code can be organized into reusable subroutines or procedures. This is similar to Python functions.

Example:

sub greet {
    my ($name) = @_;
    print "Hello, $name!
";
}

greet("Alice");

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Object-Oriented Programming (OOP)

Introduced in PERL 5, allowing the creation of classes and objects.

Example:

package Person;
sub new {
    my ($class, $name, $age) = @_;
    my $self = { name => $name, age => $age };
    bless $self, $class;
    return $self;
}

sub greet {
    my ($self) = @_;
    print "Hello, my name is $self->{name} and I am $self->{age} years old.
";
}

package main;
my $person = Person->new("Alice", 25);
$person->greet();

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Scripting

PERL excels at text processing, file manipulation, and quick automation tasks. Compared to Bash, it offers more powerful pattern matching via regular expressions.

Example:

my $text = "This is a sample sentence with numbers 123 and 456.";
if ($text =~ /(\d+)/) {
    print "Found a number: $1
";  # Outputs: Found a number: 123
}

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