1. Why Perl?

Perl is a powerful and practical programming language that is well worth learning. This website aims to convince you by offering small yet useful code examples, with or without detailed annotations.

Here are some of Perl’s strengths:

  • Stable and actively developed - Perl has a long, reliable history and continues to evolve.
  • Very fast - It performs efficiently, even for demanding tasks.
  • Easy to understand - Its syntax is expressive and readable once you grasp the basics.
  • Extensive documentation - A vast collection of documentation, tutorials, and books is available.
  • Over 200,000 modules on CPAN - Why reinvent the wheel? The Comprehensive Perl Archive Network provides reusable modules to extend your scripts (1), and most include example code.
  • Large and helpful community - On platforms like Reddit and Stack Overflow, you can find countless discussions and solutions to Perl programming problems.
  • The philosophy: TIMTOWTDI (2) - 'There Is More Than One Way To Do It.' Perl embraces flexibility and creativity.
  • Powerful regular expressions - Text processing is one of Perl's core strengths.
  • Advanced data structures - Perl can manage large amounts of data in complex in-memory structures, similar to working with a database (3).
Perl combines flexibility, power, and practicality - making it a language that continues to be relevant and enjoyable to use.

At the time of writing, these snippets were developed and tested using Perl 5.36 or later on several Linux distributions, mainly ArcoLinux (now no longer maintained) and MX Linux.

Footnotes
(1) You may ask if these modules are of good quality. I can’t guarantee, but if often more than one developer is involved in creating the module (controlled by a community), I’ve no doubt…
(2) Which solution do you want? :-)

$concat = $a.$b;
$concat = "$a$b";
$concat = join ", $a, $b;
$concat = sprintf("%s%s",$a,$b);
$concat =~ s/.*/$a$b/s;
(3) Study the tuorial on the Storable module.