I think Perl's real strength is that it makes "easy things easy and hard things possible" for not a single domain, but for many. Perl is a generalist language; many people call it a glue language becuase it can interface in to many different protocols, systems, and data stores. But calling Perl 'glue' is a bit disparaging. Glue is usually used to hold interesting bits together, but is not interesting itself. Typically interfacing disparate systems and doing something useful with them is more substantial. I prefer 'infrastructure'.
Some people say Perl excels as a text processing language; with its wide range of string, regex and formatting functions, I agree. But I use Perl mostly for scientific and number crunching. Writing such code is fast and easy with modules like the Perl Data Language. Although I used to program in domain-specific Fortran, Perl is far more pleasant and flexible.
-
Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
-
Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:
<code> <a> <b> <big>
<blockquote> <br /> <dd>
<dl> <dt> <em> <font>
<h1> <h2> <h3> <h4>
<h5> <h6> <hr /> <i>
<li> <nbsp> <ol> <p>
<small> <strike> <strong>
<sub> <sup> <table>
<td> <th> <tr> <tt>
<u> <ul>
-
Snippets of code should be wrapped in
<code> tags not
<pre> tags. In fact, <pre>
tags should generally be avoided. If they must
be used, extreme care should be
taken to ensure that their contents do not
have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent
horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor
intervention).
-
Want more info? How to link
or How to display code and escape characters
are good places to start.
|