Introduction A Potted History Perl was originally written by Larry Wall while he was working at NASA's Jet Propulsion Labs. Larry is an Internet legend: Not only is he well-known for Perl, but as the author of the UNIX utilities rn, which was one of the original Usenet newsreaders, and patch, a tremendously useful utility that takes a list of differences between two files and allows you to turn one into the other. The word 'patch' used for this activity is now widespread. Perl started life as a 'glue' language, for the use of Larry and his officemates, allowing one to 'stick' different tools together by converting between their various data formats. It pulled together the best features of several languages: the powerful regular expressions from sed (the UNIX stream editor), the pattern-scanning language awk, and a few other languages and utilities. The syntax was further made up out of C, Pascal, Basic, UNIX shell languages, English and maybe a few other things along the way. Version 1 of Perl hit the world on December 18, 1987, and the language has been steadily developing since then, with contributions from innumerable people. Perl 2 expanded the regular expression support, while Perl 3 allowed Perl to deal with binary data. Perl 4 was released so that the Camel Book (see the Resources section at the end of this chapter) could refer to a new version of Perl. Perl 5 has seen some rather drastic changes in syntax and some pretty fantastic extensions to the language. Perl 5 is (more or less) backwardly compatible with previous versions of the language, but at the same time, makes a lot of the old code obsolete. Perl 4 code may still run, but Perl 4 style is definitely frowned upon these days. At the time of writing, the current stable release of Perl is 5.6, which is what this book will detail. That said, the maintainers of Perl are very careful to ensure that old code will run, perhaps all the way back to Perl 1 – changes and features that break existing programs are evaluated extremely seriously. Everything you see here will continue to function in the future. I say 'maintainers' because Larry no longer looks after Perl by himself – there is a group of 'porters' who maintain the language and produce new releases. The 'perl5-porters' mailing list is the main development list for the language, and you can see the discussions archived at http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/. For each release, one of the porters will carry the 'patch pumpkin' – the responsibility for putting together and releasing the next version of Perl. Introduction Where is Perl going in the future? Well, we expect Perl to develop steadily up the 5.x release series, adding more useful features and steadily deprecating more and more of the accumulated old- fashionedness, making it harder for people to justify the myth that Perl 4 is still alive and well. There is at least one existing project to rewrite Perl from scratch: Chip Salzenberg is heading up a team called the Topaz project, which aims to produce a faster, more efficient Perl. Topaz is being written in C++, rather than C, but hopes to remain compatible with Perl 5. At the moment, the Topaz team isn't planning to add any new features to the language, but I'm sure that as the project gains momentum, more features will be added. You might sometimes hear Topaz referred to as Perl 6, but it'll only really become Perl 6 if Larry likes it – the way things are going, Topaz won't be in common use for quite some time yet, and I expect that Perl 6 will be the natural development of the current Perl. Why Perl? Just like the Basic programming language, the name 'Perl' isn't really an acronym. People like making up acronyms though, and Larry has two favorite expansions. According to its creator, perl is the Practical Extraction and Report Language, or the Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister. Either way, it doesn't really matter. Perl is a language for doing what you want to do. The Perl motto is 'There's More Than One Way To Do It', emphasizing both the flexibility of Perl and the fact that Perl is about getting the job done. We can say that one Perl program is faster, or more idiomatic, or more efficient than another, but if both do the same thing, Perl isn't going to judge which one is 'better'. It also means that you don't need to know every last little detail about the language in order to do what you want with it. You'll probably be able to achieve a lot of the tasks you might want to use Perl for after the first four or five chapters of this book. Perl has some very obvious strengths ❑ It's very easy to learn, and learning a little Perl can get you a long way. ❑ Perl was designed to be easy for humans to write, rather than easy for computers to understand. The syntax of the language is a lot more like a human language than the strict, rigid grammars and structures of other languages, so it doesn't impose a particular way of thinking upon you. ❑ Perl is very portable; That means what it sounds like – you can pick up a Perl program and carry it around between computers. Perl is available for a huge variety of operating systems and computers, and properly written programs should run almost anywhere that Perl does without any change. ❑ Perl talks text. It thinks about words and sentences, where other languages see the character at a time. It also thinks about files in terms of lines, not individual bytes. Its 'regular expressions' allow you to search for and transform text in innumerable ways with ease and speed. ❑ Perl is what is termed a 'high-level language'. Some languages like C concern you with unnecessary, 'low-level' details about the computer's operation: making sure you have enough free memory, making sure all parts of your program are set up properly before you try to use them, and leaving you with strange and unfriendly errors if you don't do so. Perl cuts you free from all this. However, since Perl is so easy to learn and to use, especially for quick little administrative tasks, 'real' Perl users tend to write programs for small, specific jobs. In these cases, the code is meant to have a short lifespan and is for the programmer's eyes only. The problem is, these programs 2 Introduction may live a little longer than the programmer expects and be seen by other eyes too. The result is a cryptic one-liner that is incomprehensible to everyone but the original programmer. Because of the proliferation of these rather concise and confusing programs, Perl has developed a reputation for being arcane and unintelligible – one that I hope we can dispel during the course of this book. This reputation is unfair. It's possible to write code that is tortuous and difficult to follow in any programming language, and Perl was never meant to be difficult. In fact, Perl is one of the easiest languages to learn, especially given its scope and flexibility. Throughout this book you will learn how to avoid the stereotypical 'spaghetti code' and how to write programs that are both easy to write and easy to follow. Let's work to kill off this negative image. It's Free Larry started (and indeed, continued) Perl with the strong belief that software should be free – freely available, freely modifiable, and freely distributable. Perl is developed and maintained by the porters, who are volunteers from the Perl user community, all of whom strive to make Perl as good as possible. This has a few nice side effects – the porters are working for love, rather than merely because it's their job, so they're motivated solely by their desire to see a better Perl. It also means Perl will continue to be free to use and distribute. This doesn't mean that Perl is part of the GNU suite of utilities. The GNU ("GNU's Not UNIX") project was set up to produce a freely usable, distributable, and modifiable version of the UNIX operating system and its tools. It now produces a lot of helpful, free utilities. Perl is included in distributions of GNU software, but Perl itself is not a product of the Free Software Foundation, the body that oversees GNU. While Perl can be distributed under the terms of the GNU Public License (which you can find at http://www.gnu.org/), it can also be distributed under the Artistic License (found either with the perl sources or at http://www.opensource.org/licenses/), which purports to give more freedom to users and more security to developers than the GPL. You may judge for yourself – we've included these licenses in Appendix G. Of course, those wanting to use Perl at work might be a little put off by this – managers like to pay money for things and have pieces of paper saying that they can get irate at someone if it all stops working. There's a question in the Perl FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) about how to get a commercial version or support for Perl, and we'll see how you can find out the answer for yourself pretty soon. What Is Perl Used For? Far and away the most popular use of Perl is for CGI programming – that is, dynamically generating web pages.