h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Do you really have big feet? That is what your name implies (Just in case you didn't know, although you most probably did...) - I was wondering what Perl is like, and how easy it is to use for GUI apps.

Yes "big feet".

I really took the name because of Douglas Adam's description of it in Last Chance To See. The bird should be the emblem of computer programmers

PERL is a pretty useful language. It is particularly strong for string manipulation (beats the pants off of C and Java for that kind of stuff) and co-operating with, linking or running other applications.

The syntax is similar to C or Java, but it has no data typing. It runs interpretively, but it's not as slow as one might think - besides I tend to use it for tasks that have a significant I/O overhead anyway, so the relative slowness (in comparison to C, not to Java) is not a big deal for me.

It was designed to be extensible. Anybody can write "modules" which are effectively plug ins to Perl and provide extra functionality. The standard Perl distribution comes with a standard library of modules, and there are 1000s more available for download from CPAN (Comprehensive Perl Archive Network) mirrors all over the 'web.

There are modules that allow for Perl to be used for GUI apps. The GUI apps can run on Windoze, or Linux, most Unices, MAC... Perl is available for a HUUUUUUGE array of OS platforms.

You should check out [URL removed by moderator] for more details. If you want books then the O'Reilly range are especially good. The guy who first wrote Perl, Larry Wall, writes for O'Reilly.

Oh yes... Hi there

Duh! Great thing of me forgot...

The real strength of Perl is that you can develop really quickly in it.

Larry Wall wrote Perl because he had jobs to do that weren't easily done with shell scripts, but he felt too lazy to write a C program to do them. So he wrote a whole programming language instead

He aimed to contrive something that was not as powerful as C, but was as quick to write as shell scripts.

Which is what Perl is. Though it has morphed some over the years into something that is more complex and more powerful, you can still use a small subset of perl very productively indeed.

Thank you for the description of Perl. I will try to get some software previews (or similar) for it - for it sounds good.