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

Perl is a stable, cross platform programming language. Perl project is used for mission critical projects in the public and private sectors and is widely used to program web applications of all needs.

Here are some key features of "Perl":

· Perl is a stable, cross platform programming language.
· It is used for mission critical projects in the public and private sectors.
· Perl is Open Source software, licensed under its Artistic License, or the GNU General Public License.
· Perl was created by Larry Wall.
· Perl 1.0 was released to usenet's alt.comp.sources in 1987
· PC Magazine named Perl a finalist for its 1998 Technical Excellence Award in the Development Tool category.
· Perl is listed in the Oxford English Dictionary.
· Perl takes the best features from other languages, such as C, awk, sed, sh, and BASIC, among others.
· Perls database integration interface (DBI) supports third-party databases including Oracle, Sybase, Postgres, MySQL and others.
· Perl works with HTML, XML, and other mark-up languages.
· Perl supports Unicode.
· Perl is Y2K compliant.
· Perl supports both procedural and object-oriented programming.
· Perl interfaces with external C/C libraries through XS or SWIG.
· Perl is extensible. There are over 500 third party modules available from the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN).
· The Perl interpreter can be embedded into other systems.
· Perl is the most popular web programming language due to its text manipulation capabilities and rapid development cycle.
· Perl is widely known as "the duct-tape of the Internet".
· Perl's CGI.pm module, part of Perl's standard distribution, makes handling HTML forms simple.
· Perl can handle encrypted Web data, including e-commerce transactions.
· Perl can be embedded into web servers to speed up processing by as much as 2000%.
· mod_perl allows the Apache web server to embed a Perl interpreter.
· Perl's DBI package makes web-database integration easy.

What's New in This Release:

· This version includes a new smart match operator, a switch statement, the // defined-or operator, regular expression improvements, and other language changes (some inspired by Perl 6).
· The Perl interpreter itself is faster, with a smaller memory footprint and several UTF-8 and threading improvements.