Re: Why Perl

Perl is often used where text and strings are processed. It has much more comfortable string processing than C, built-in powerful regular expressions and many other handy features.

That makes it useful for system administrators, web programmers, biologists (DNA is often stored as a large string, after all) and many other people.

Some people who love the language also use it for many other task, because they find some of its unique features very convenient:

context sensitivity
In many dynamic languages, the type of operands determines the operation (in javascript "2" + 3 is "23", but 2 + "3" is 5). In Perl + is always addition, and concatenation has a different operator - the symbol determines the operation, not the type
The Comprehensive Perl Archive Network, CPAN, is a very useful resource with tens of thousands modules
A language designer who is a linguist rather than a computer scientist
A very friendly and open community
Excellent testing tools, and much interesting in Q/A topics in the community

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Re^2: Why Perl by JavaFan (Canon) on Feb 01, 2010 at 13:26 UTC
In Perl + is always addition, and concatenation has a different operator Except when it isn't. Blessed types can overload operators - and then it's the type of the operand(s) that determine what's going to happen. the symbol determines the operation, not the type Except when it doesn't. `\|` and `&` do behave differently depending on their operands - and it's more complicated than whether it's a number or a string; it'll depend on some internal flag. But more important is the context. Some operators behave wildly different in scalar and list context - but they have the same symbol(s).	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^3: Why Perl by moritz (Cardinal) on Feb 01, 2010 at 13:35 UTC
Except when it isn't. Blessed types can overload operators - and then it's the type of the operand(s) that determine what's going to happen. That's true. Since Perl is a quite mutable language, you can always shoot yourself and other in the foot with modules. the symbol determines the operation, not the type Except when it doesn't. Sure, there are unfortunate exceptions. As far as I can tell they have been removed in Perl 6. Perl 6 - links to (nearly) everything that is Perl 6.	[reply]