Perl Support

What is Perl?
Perl has long been one of the most popular Web programming languages around. It is currently used by companies such as Amazon.com, MP3.com, and Deja.com to run their Websites. Due to its strong text processing abilities, Perl has become one of the most popular languages for building Internet applications and is used by over one million programmers worldwide.

With the Internet as the standard medium for the transfer of business information, Perl is an integral part of web developers, administrators and system administrators' tools on Linux, UNIX and Windows platforms. Perl is an interpreted language, which makes it easy to build and test simple programs. As an open source language Perl source code is freely available under the Perl Artistic License.

Perl is also robust enough to allow for the creation of complex programs. Because Perl is extremely useful in "gluing" together smaller programs into larger applications, it has often been referred to as "the duct tape of the Internet." 

Benefits of Programming in Perl:
	optimized for scanning text
	can use sophisticated pattern matching techniques, using regular expressions, to scan large amounts of data quickly
	modularity and reusability using innumerable modules
	embeddable and extensible
	subroutines can be overridden, auto-loaded, and prototyped
	anonymous subroutines
	arbitrarily nested data structures
	object-oriented programming
	support for threading (light-weight processes)
	support for internationalization, localization, and Unicode
	POSIX 1003.1 compliant library