[Practical Extraction and Report
Language, a.k.a. Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister] An
interpreted language developed by Larry Wall
(<larry@wall.org>, author of patch(1) and
rn(1)) and distributed over Usenet. Superficially resembles
awk, but is much hairier, including many facilities
reminiscent of sed(1) and shells and a comprehensive Unix
system-call interface. Unix sysadmins, who are almost always
incorrigible hackers, generally consider it one of the
languages of choice, and it is by far the most widely used
tool for making `live' web pages via CGI. Perl has been described,
in a parody of a famous remark about lex(1), as the
"Swiss-Army chainsaw" of Unix programming. Though Perl is very
useful, it would be a stretch to describe it as pretty or
elegant; people who like clean, spare design generally prefer
Python. See also Camel Book, TMTOWTDI
