So what is PERL actually ? (Now, we know it is not a fashion accessory)

Note :
Hey, Hey do we have to write PERL as PERL, i.e in all caps. Actually, No, Perl came as a name rather than an acronym, so there is no need to express it as an all caps entity.

PERL took its first foot on planet earth in mid-80’s, when a guy named Larry Wall found the ‘awk’ utility (a very powerful data processing engine) not suitable for a bug reporting system he was building. He found the then available Unix tools no match for the problem he had at hand. Like a true hacker he was, he took the problem head-on by building a tool to meet his reporting tasks and Perl version zero was born. Later Larry Wall came up with an expansion for Perl and from then on this language got the expansion ‘ Practical Extraction and Report Language’.

BTW you can meet the whole family of Wall’s @ http://www.wall.org/

Let’s start the journey through the land of Perl with some historical diggings.

The first version of Perl, Perl 1.000 was made available on the net on December 18 1987

I am giving an excerpt from the ReadMe file that came up with the initial version of Perl

"Title: perl
Version: 1
Submitted: Jan 31 1988
Author: Larry Wall lwall@jpl-devvax.jpl.nasa.gov
Submittor: Larry Wall
Description: a "replacement" for awk and sed"

On 5th June 1988, the second edition Perl 2.000, hit the markets.

On 18th October 1989, Perl 3.00 is released and this time Larry releases it under GNU Licensing.

21st March 1991 and it’s Perl 4.000 ‘s term to be developers mate.

Perl gets a complete make over in 1994 when the 5th version is launched on 18th October.

The latest version that is yet there in the development process is Perl 6. We will definitely see a lot of Action on Perl 6 in this Blog in the future.

So now go and take a shower as I am sure you people will have accumulated a lot of dirt and grit by following me on this historical trail. But knowing history is a good thing that will assist you in your steps in future. Next time we will meet with some hands-on Perl stuff.