Appendix D. Perl and the .NET Runtime

Jan Dubois

Appendix D credit: Jan Dubois, Senior Developer, ActiveState. Copyright 2002, ActiveState. All rights reserved. ActiveState, Perl Dev Kit, PerlNET, and Visual Perl are trademarks of ActiveState SRL.

Perl is one of the most popular dynamically typed scripting languages. It was created by Larry Wall and publicly released for the first time in 1987. The current version, Perl 5, was released in 1994 and is still under active development, with Perl 5.8 being released in summer 2002.

Perl copied the best features from other languages such as C, awk, sed, sh, and BASIC. It is especially powerful for text manipulation and rapid development, which made it an ideal language for Web development (it has often been called "the duct tape of the Internet"). Another major advantage of Perl is the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN), a distributed archive of more than 2000 modules for most common (and not so common) programming tasks .

We have used two approaches to bring Perl to the .NET runtime: the "Perl for .NET Research compiler" and the "PerlNET component builder."