A collection of small programs written in scripting languages to perform simple tasks.
Perl is a language for getting your job done.
Of course, if your job is programming, you can get your job done with any “com-
plete” computer language, theoretically speaking. But we know from experience
that computer languages differ not so much in what they make possible, but in
what they make easy. At one extreme, the so-called “fourth generation languages”
make it easy to do some things, but nearly impossible to do other things. At the
other extreme, so-called “industrial-strength” languages make it equally difficult
to do almost everything.
Perl is different. In a nutshell, Perl is designed to make the easy jobs easy, without
making the hard jobs impossible.
Hi, my name is Camelia. I'm the spokesbug for Raku. Raku intends to carry forward the high ideals of the Perl community. Raku has been developed by a team of dedicated and enthusiastic volunteers, and continues to be developed. You can help too. The only requirement is that you know how to be nice to all kinds of people (and butterflies). Go to #raku and someone will be glad to help you get started.
Computer users spend a lot of time doing simple, mechanical data manipula- tion - changing the format of data, checking its validity, finding items with some property, adding up numbers, printing reports, and the like. All of these jobs ought to be mechanized, but it's a real nuisance to have to write a special- purpose program in a standard language like C each time such a task comes up. Awk is a programming language that makes it possible to handle such tasks with very short programs, often only one or two lines long. An awk program is a sequence of patterns and actions that tell what to look for in the input data and what to do when it's found. Awk searches a set of files for lines matched by any of the patterns; when a matching line is found, the corresponding action is performed. A pattern can select lines by combinations of regular expressions and comparison operations on strings, numbers, fields, variables, and array ele- ments. Actions may perform arbitrary processing on selected lines; the action language looks like C but there are no declarations, and strings and numbers are built-in data types.