Perl version 5 is:

A powerful, portable, semi-compiled (bytecode interpreted), C-like, general purpose programming language. It's major features include, concise high-level syntax, extensive built-in/CORE functionality, powerful and concise regular expression engine for text manipulation, and a huge freely usable and distributable library of modular extensions for almost any purpose imaginable. This combination of features allows its use for the rapid development, testing and maintainance of many types of applications, especially text, web, database and system-administration applications using either procedural or OO-syntax. It is easy to use, but like most complex things, requires training and/ or practice to use well.

Neat-o.

Good that you mention regular expressions, but I think that what is missing in that paragraph, is a mention of hashes. In layman's terms, that could be described as "string indexed arrays", while the old name "associative arrays" is good as a set of keywords for a search in online documentation.

Good point. If I recall, the paragraph comes in well under the 125 words limit, so the OP should have no trouble incorporating it if he decides any of it was worth having.

---

Examine what is said, not who speaks.

The 7th Rule of perl club is -- pearl clubs are easily damaged. Use a diamond club instead.

Careful: redistributing CPAN modules is different from using them. IANAL, but I know there's a huge difference there and you have to be very careful. ++ on the rest though.

Makeshifts last the longest.

jeffa

L-LL-L--L-LL-L--L-LL-L--
-R--R-RR-R--R-RR-R--R-RR
B--B--B--B--B--B--B--B--
H---H---H---H---H---H---
(the triplet paradiddle with high-hat)

"I would also mention the CPAN with it's many wheels ready to go."

4101 wheels on my wagon, and I keep rolling along...

Perl is a language optimized for scanning arbitrary text files, extracting information from those text files, and printing reports based on that information. It's also a good language for many system management tasks. The language is intended to be practical (easy to use, efficient, complete) rather than beautiful (tiny, elegant, minimal).

Perl combines (in the author's opinion, anyway) some of the best features of C, sed, awk, and sh, so people familiar with those languages should have little difficulty with it. (Language historians will also note some vestiges of csh, Pascal, and even BASIC-PLUS.) Expression syntax corresponds closely to C expression syntax. Unlike most Unix utilities, Perl does not arbitrarily limit the size of your data--if you've got the memory, Perl can slurp in your whole file as a single string. Recursion is of unlimited depth. And the tables used by hashes (sometimes called "associative arrays") grow as necessary to prevent degraded performance. Perl can use sophisticated pattern matching techniques to scan large amounts of data quickly. Although optimized for scanning text, Perl can also deal with binary data, and can make dbm files look like hashes. Setuid Perl scripts are safer than C programs through a dataflow tracing mechanism that prevents many stupid security holes.

If you have a problem that would ordinarily use sed or awk or sh, but it exceeds their capabilities or must run a little faster, and you don't want to write the silly thing in C, then Perl may be for you. There are also translators to turn your sed and awk scripts into Perl scripts.
But wait, there's more...

Begun in 1993 (see perlhist), Perl version 5 is nearly a complete rewrite that provides the following additional benefits:

• modularity and reusability using innumerable modules
  Described in perlmod, perlmodlib, and perlmodinstall.

  embeddable and extensible

  Described in perlembed, perlxstut, perlxs, perlcall, perlguts, and xsubpp.

  roll-your-own magic variables (including multiple simultaneous DBM implementations)

  Described in perltie and AnyDBM_File.

  subroutines can now be overridden, autoloaded, and prototyped

  Described in perlsub.

  arbitrarily nested data structures and anonymous functions

  Described in perlreftut, perlref, perldsc, and perllol.

  object-oriented programming

  Described in perlobj, perlboot, perltoot, perltooc, and perlbot.

  compilability into C code or Perl bytecode

  Described in B and B::Bytecode.

  support for light-weight processes (threads)

  Described in perlthrtut and Thread.

  support for internationalization, localization, and Unicode

  Described in perllocale and utf8.

  lexical scoping

  Described in perlsub.

  regular expression enhancements

  Described in perlre, with additional examples in perlop.

  enhanced debugger and interactive Perl environment, with integrated editor support

  Described in perldebtut, perldebug and perldebguts.

  POSIX 1003.1 compliant library

  Described in POSIX.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
Be sure to read my standard disclaimer if this is a reply.

Yeah, but at least the original description wasn't posted in code tags ;-P

The blurb BrowserUK posted is by far the best. It's concise, descriptive and well written. Stick with it.

Maybe you can pull something from the Perl 5.8.0 press release.

Perl, the Practical Extraction and Report Language, was first released by Larry Wall, a linguist and programmer, in 1987. Since then it has become the automation tool of choice for systems administrators and programmers around the world.

It is available for a bewildering number of platforms: virtually all known and current UNIX derivatives are supported as are other systems like Windows, Mac OS, VMS, MS-DOS, OS/2, QNX, BeOS, and the Amiga. Perl is now included in the default installs of Apple's Mac OS X and Sun Solaris version 9.

Perl is most commonly associated with web programming, being the development tool of choice for many people serving dynamic, data driven web pages. Several methods are available for running Perl on the web, such as the ever-popular CGI and mod_perl, the enterprise-class application module. According to Security Space, mod_perl is deployed on over 1.6 million Apache web servers, a constantly-rising figure that does not include the millions of servers running Perl through CGI.

Sites making use of Perl include Amazon.com, Wired, Slashdot.org, Alexa and the Internet Wayback machine, a hundred terabyte archive which is five times larger than the the Library of Congress.

"The first rule of Perl club is you do not talk about Perl club."
-- Chip Salzenberg

How about:

Perl is *THE* language.

Perl is a free and powerful programming language currently used by companies such as amazon.com, MP3.com and deja.com to run their websites. Due to its strong text-processing capabilities, Perl hast become one of the most popular languages for building Internet applications, and has established itself as an integral part web developers', administrators' and system administrators' tools on both unix and windows platforms. Perl is intended to be practical (easy to use, efficient, complete) rather than beautiful (tiny, minimal, elegant), and features a rich and growing set of third-party modules for almost every imaginable task.

--
mowgli

-bl0rf
master of disfunctional regural rexpressions

Ouch! I sense a little bit of bias here - didn't realize that ASP was such a major "invention".

Does anybody else get as furious as I do when people have the attitude of perl being only "a basic scripting language" or "for CGI only" ? Perl is used for much more than just CGI, not the least of which is mod_perl, a faster more powerful implementation than ASP.

It definitely irks me. In fact, in reaction to everything I write in Perl being called a "Perl script" regardless of its complexity, I have backlashed in the other direction. Around work, I always intentionally refer to code written in Perl as a "Perl program", even if it's a one-line throwaway script. The truth is that most Perl code I write is somewhere in between the two extremes of throwaway scripts and large applications, but a lot of people just don't understand that Perl is not merely for quickie one-off scripts.

-- Mike

--
just,my${.02}

Yes, that irks me as well! I probably one of the few people that didn't learn Perl from Web/CGI programming. I use it for everything but web programming, just because I don't do much(any) web design. I use Perl for client- server programs, text processing, atomated processes, and TONS of database work. I usally get to fustrated to reply as well as people have here(Bravo to the monks who offered some great definitions!), so I usally state,

"You can do anything with Perl!" :-)

STH

No, no! You're taking it the wrong way!
What it's saying is, ASP was able to displace Perl at the very lowest end; but for everything else, Perl is still being used, just as it always was.
:-)

jdporter
The 6th Rule of Perl Club is -- There is no Rule #6.

Makeshifts last the longest.

How do you guys feel when people say it's the duct tape of programming languages? I don't completely agree with that because every perl script that I've wrote so far had nothing to do with another language. They are all their own little program.

Being duct tape is one of the things Perl excels at. It isn't the only one, and people (like you) can use it for entirely different strengths without ever gluing anything together using Perl. Like the Swiss army chainsaw metaphor implies, Perl is useful for a huge range of different things.

Makeshifts last the longest.

Probably not much help to you though... :) I'll try to think of something before I go to sleep tonight...