Appendix C: Perl Basics

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What Are Perl's Strengths?

The answer to this question depends partially on your needs. Perl is certainly known for its many built-in functions for text manipulation that give tremendous power to parse text. This capability made Perl attractive not only for text processing, but also for Web-based applications. Moreover, Perl provides many built-in functions that are system calls in C. For instance, you might be surprised to know that it's quite easy to write Perl scripts for creating pipes, queues, semaphores, shared memory, sockets, and interprocess communication. You can write a simple socket-based web server in Perl without much code (or difficulty) that runs on multiple platforms, and, because of Perl's portability, no code compilation is required. The powerful feature set of Perl will dispel the misconception that Perl is meant for CGI scripts. Indeed, it's the power of Perl that made it an early choice for CGI scripts.

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