Stands for Practical Extraction and Report Language. Invented by Larry Hall, a Unix programmer who had got bored of the text handling limitations of the programming languages available at the time. Perhaps, the best thing about Perl is that you do not have to worry about low-level programming tasks like data types or memory allocation. It also gives strong support to regular expressions vital for any serious text processing task. Although certainly powerful and easy-to-learn, Perl can be cryptic at times.