PEARL

PEARL PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE

PEARL, or Process and Experiment Automation Realtime Language, is a computer programming language designed for multitasking and real-time programming. Being a high-level language, it is fairly cross-platform. Since 1977, the language has been going under several standardization steps by the Deutsches Institut für Normung. The current version is PEARL-90, which was standardized in 1998 as DIN 66253-2.

PEARL is not to be confused with the similarly named Perl, an entirely unrelated programming language.

FEATURES

PEARL supports both fixed-point and floating-point numeric values, character and character string data as well as bit values. It also provides facilities for structures and multi-dimensional arrays. Both typed and untyped pointers are also supported, along with typecasting.

PEARL is a higher programming language, which allows a comfortable, secure and almost processor independent programming of multitasking- and realtime problems and has been standardized since 1977 at various stages of its development, the last time 1998 as PEARL-90 (DIN 66253-2 1998, Berlin, Beuth-Verlag, 1998).

Besides the simple possibility to map process technical problems, an important principle at the development of PEARL was the easy learning by the programmer.

All basic data types and language structures of other procedural programming languages exist in PEARL. In addition PEARL offers comfortable language elements for the handling of multitasking- and realtime tasks.

Like most other high-level languages, PEARL supports procedures and functions, and passing parameters to these can be done by value or by reference (via pointers).

 Perl is used for graphics programming, system administration, network programming, finance, bioinformatics, and other applications. Perl is nicknamed "the Swiss Army chainsaw of scripting languages" because of its flexibility and power, and possibly also because of its perceived "ugliness". In 1998, it was also referred to as the "duct tape that holds the Internet together", in reference to its ubiquity and perceived inelegance

Perl 4 went through a series of maintenance releases, culminating in Perl 4.036 in 1993. At that point, Wall abandoned Perl 4 to begin work on Perl 5. Initial design of Perl 5 continued into 1994. The perl5-porters mailing list was established in May 1994 to coordinate work on porting Perl 5 to different platforms. It remains the primary forum for development, maintenance, and porting of Perl 5.