Perl is a "Practical Extraction and Report Language" freely
available for Unix, MVS, VMS, MS/DOS, Macintosh, OS/2, Amiga, and other
operating systems. Perl has powerful text-manipulation functions. It
eclectically combines features and purposes of many command languages. Perl has
enjoyed recent popularity for programming World Wide Web electronic forms and
generally as glue and gateway between systems, databases, and users.