| Answer2: Perl was originally a file management language for Unix, but it has become well known for its use in CGI programming. CGI (Common Gateway Interface) is a term for programs that web servers can execute to allow web pages additional capabilities.
Perl is great with regular expression pattern matching, which is a method for searching text. Perl can be used for databases and other useful server functions, and it is simple to pick up the basics if you have experience in any imperative language. Web hosting services prefer Perl over C++ as a CGI language because the web hosts can inspect Perl script files, since they're just text files, while C++ is compiled, so it can't be inspected for potentially dangerous code. Perl is, however, notorious for its "write once" style of code -- it's very easy to write Perl scripts taking advantage of lots of shortcuts that you later cannot understand. |
