Perl (short for Practical Extraction and Report Language) is a general-purpose programming language invented by Larry Wall in 1987. With way over one million users around the globe, it's not hard to see why it has become the language of choice for Web development, text processing, Internet services and even mail filtering, graphical programming, systems administration, and every other common task requiring portable and easily-developed solutions. However; more modern languages like PHP and ASP is about to replace the use of Perl for web developing purposes.