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Perl /perl/ n.
[Practical Extraction and Report Language, a.k.a. Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister] An interpreted language developed by Larry Wall (author of patch(1) and rn(1)) and distributed over Usenet. Superficially resembles [awk], but is much hairier, including many facilities reminiscent of sed(1) and shells and a comprehensive Unix system-call interface. Unix sysadmins, who are almost always incorrigible hackers, generally consider it one of the [languages of choice], and it is by far the most widely used tool for making `live' web pages via CGI. Perl has been described, in a parody of a famous remark about lex(1), as the "Swiss-Army chainsaw" of Unix programming. Though Perl is very useful, it would be a stretch to describe it as pretty or [elegant]; people who like clean, spare design generally prefer [Python]. See also [Camel Book], [TMTOWTDI].
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