Perl

Perl, also Practical Extraction and Report Language (a backronym, see below), is an interpreted procedural programming language designed by Larry Wall. Perl borrows features from C, shell scripting (sh), awk, sed, and (to a lesser extent) many other programming languages.

History

Larry Wall began work on Perl in 1987, and released version 1.0 to the comp.sources.misc newsgroup on December 18, 1987. The language expanded rapidly over the next few years. Perl 2, released in 1988, featured a better regular expression engine. Perl 3, released in 1989, added support for binary data.

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1987 - December 18 - 1988 - 1989

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Until 1991, the only documentation for Perl was a single (increasingly lengthy) man page. In 1991, Programming Perl (the Camel Book) was published, and became the de facto reference for the language. At the same time, the Perl version number was bumped to 4, not to mark a major change in the language, but to identify the version that was documented by the book.

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1991 - Programming Perl

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Perl 4 went through a series of maintenance releases, culminating in Perl 4.036 in 1993. At that point, Larry Wall abandoned Perl 4 to begin work on Perl 5. Perl 4 remains at version 4.036 to this day.

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Development of Perl 5 continued into 1994. The perl5-porters mailing list was established in May 1994 to coordinate work on porting Perl 5 to different platforms. It remains the primary forum for development, maintenance, and porting of Perl 5.

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1994 - May

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Perl 5 was released on October 17, 1994. It was a nearly complete rewrite of the interpreter, and added many new features to the language, including objects, references, packages, and modules. Importantly, modules provided a mechanism for extending the language without modifying the interpreter. This allowed the core interpreter to stablize, even as it enabled ordinary Perl programmers to add new language features.

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October 17 - 1994

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On October 26, 1995, the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN) was established. CPAN is a collection of web sites that archive and distribute Perl sources, binary distributions, documentation, scripts, and modules. Originally, each CPAN site had to be accessed through its own URL; today, the single URL http://www.cpan.org automatically redirects to a CPAN site.

Related Topics:
October 26 - 1995 - Comprehensive Perl Archive Network

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As of 2005, Perl 5 is still being actively maintained. It now includes Unicode support. The latest production release is Perl 5.8.7.

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2005 - Unicode

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At the 2000 Perl Conference Jon Orwant made a case for a major new language initiative. This led to a decision to begin work on a redesign of the language, to be called Perl 6. Proposals for new language features were solicited from the Perl community at large, and over 300 RFCs were submitted.

Related Topics:
2000 - Perl Conference - Jon Orwant - Perl 6

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Larry Wall spent the next few years digesting the RFCs and synthesizing them into a coherent framework for Perl 6. He has presented his design for Perl 6 in a series of documents called apocalypses.

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In 2001, it was decided that Perl 6 would run on a cross-language virtual machine called Parrot. As of 2005, both Perl 6 and Parrot are under active development.

Related Topics:
2001 - Virtual machine - Parrot

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