Short answer: Yes to all 4 points.

Long answer:

Of course perl can be used to do all of that, since it is a complete language. To the points:

  1. It depends. In theory, there's no difference between theory and pratice; in pratice, there is. There are many areas in which perl would be just as suitable as java, but they have been neglected by the perl community. Take smartphones and smartphone applications. While it is possible to nail perl onto an device running a linux kernel (e.g. Android phones), little code has yet been written to provide interfaces to their hardware components and libraries.
  2. Of course, many web-applications have been written using perl. The website you are visiting is all done in perl, as is slashdot afaik.
  3. The Perl Comprehensive Archive Network a.k.a CPAN contains bindings to many GUI toolkits (WxWidgets, Tk, gtk,...). WxWidgets and PerlTk run on Windows and X11 platforms.
  4. Yes, definitely. CPAN provides many modules to this end.

That said, the decision between using Perl or Java hinges more on the environment in which your code is running, and on the expertise of the coders in either language.

perl -le'print map{pack c,($-++?1:13)+ord}split//,ESEL'

In reply to Re: Can Perl do anything Java can do? by shmem
in thread Can Perl do anything Java can do? by MikeBraga

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