Perl is a general purpose programming language originally developed for text manipulation and now used for a wide range of tasks, including systems administration, Web development, network programming, GUI development, and more. It is used for mission critical projects in the public and private sectors and to program Web applications of aU needs.

The overall structure of Perl is broadly derived from C. Perl is procedural in nature, with variables, expressions, assignment statements, brace-delimited code blocks, control structures and sub-routines. Perl also takes features from sheU programming. All variables are marked with leading sigils, which unambiguously identify the data type (scalar, array, hash, etc) of the variable in context.