Perl is a powerful, flexible, and versatile programming language, originally designed for text processing and system administration. The name stands for "Practical Extraction and Report Language", though this was a retroactive acronym.

Key Features of Perl:

✅ Dynamic & flexible – Perl is not strictly typed and supports multiple programming paradigms.
✅ Strong in text processing – Ideal for regular expressions, data manipulation, and parsing.
✅ Cross-platform – Runs on Windows, Linux, macOS, and more.
✅ Large community & CPAN – The Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN) offers thousands of ready-to-use modules and extensions.
✅ Use cases – Commonly used for web development (CGI scripts), system administration, network programming, and data analysis.

A Simple Perl Program:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

print "Hello, World!\n";