| Text: Learning PERL (the Llama book), Randal L. Schwartz, OšReilly & Associates, 1993. |
| PERL4 is an interpreted language that can be regarded as a cross between C, Unix shell, sed and awk. It is a C-based language which can also deal directly with Unix commands and file system and easily do string processing matching. |
| In this course, we will concentrate not on using PERL in systems programming, but in using PERL for CGI programming, i.e. implementing programs activated from Web pages. |
| In general, we use PERL for tedious high level things which can take a long time to program but not much execution time. For computationally intense programs, we would use a compiled language such as C. |
| Our first lecture on Perl will show a series of small programming examples from Chapter 1 of the Learning Perl book, designed to illustrate the main features of the language. Later we will cover each topic in more detail. |