Perl is the abbreviation of Practical Extraction and Report Language, which can be translated as "Practical Report Extraction Language".

Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, literal, dynamic programming language.

Perl was originally designed by Larry Wall and was published on December 18, 1987.

Perl borrows features from C, sed, awk, shell scripts, and many other programming languages.

The most important feature of Perl is that Perl integrates regular expression functions and the huge third-party code library CPAN.

Perl scalar syntax

A scalar is a simple unit of data.

A scalar can be an integer, a floating point number, a character, a string, a paragraph, or a complete web page.

Perl scalar example

#!/usr/bin/perl
$age = 20;           # Integer assignment
$name = "Runoob"; # string
$salary = 130.50; #Floating point number
print "Age = $age\n";
print "Name = $name\n";
print "Salary = $salary\n";