What Is Perl?
Perl is a programming language. It was originally designed to make it easier to extract data and generate reports. Over the years, Perl has been considerably developed and enlarged, but it retains its powerful text manipulation capabilities. Perl has come to be widely used in an Internet environment for the simple reason that many Internet tasks require the processing of text: verifying and analyzing input, communicating with other systems, and generating textual output.
Well suited to use in an Internet environment, Perl is most often used to write CGI (Common Gateway Interface) scripts for Web servers. Nevertheless, you can use Perl to write standalone programs for a wide range of applications.
CGI is a protocol that, combined with a scripting language, can be used to make Web sites dynamic. Such scripts can query a database, perform file operations, and generate Web pages on-the-fly, thus allowing you to build a Web site that interacts with the user. CGI scripts do not have to be written in Perl, and indeed C, Visual Basic, Java, and other languages can be used. But because of Perl's qualities, it is highly suited to most CGI tasks.
Note
Perl is an acronym for Practical Extraction and Report Language.
Things written in Perl are usually called Perl scripts or CGI scripts, although the term Perl program is also correct. The main reason that the word “script” is more commonly used than “program” is simply because the Perl language is usually interpreted rather than compiled.