History of Perl
...h Perl and made it perform more tasks. The language was not originally called Perl, Larry, his coworkers, family and friends considered just about every three or four letter words. One of the earliest names was “Gloria” (the name of Larry Wall’s wife), but it was replaced as “Pearl”, which was changed into the present day “Perl,” partly due to the existence of a graphics language called “Pearl,” but mostly because five letters was too much to type all the time. Throughout the years, Perl has gone through many versions. By 1992, Perl version 4 had become a “standard” UNIX programming language and also very stable. However, this version of Perl was beginning to show its limitations and Larry’s programmer team noticed that more people were choosing other languages rather than Perl. By 1994, Larry’s programmer team started to take action and create another version of Perl, Perl Version 5. With this version, Perl became truly a workable, general purpose programming language and no longer just a convenient tool for system administrators. Other minor versions of Perl such as version 5.6 are still useful until now. Perl 6 has been planned for 2002 and it supports Unicode, which means that it makes it possible to represent Chinese or Japanese characters as well as English in digital commands The purpose of Perl is to assist the programmers with common tasks that are probably ...