Perl 5

About Perl 5

package HelloWorld;
use strict;
use warnings;

sub hello {
  return 'Hello, World!';
}

1;

Perl v5 is a high-level general purpose programming language invented by Larry Wall and first released in 1987. It is an eclectic interpreted, procedural, loosely typed language. Its popularity peaked with the rise of the World Wide Web, though it remains widely used in Quality Assurance, IT infrastructure automation, text processing, bioinformatics and web application development, just to name a few areas. It is highly flexible, but this flexibility can have a follow-on maintenance cost.

Perl also has:

• minimal built-in object support, but interesting 3rd party OO
• first class functions
• closures
• a powerful built-in regular expression engine
• the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN), a massive library of user-contributed modules

Every well-known Unix and Unix-style operating system ships with Perl included.