Perl en · PROPN
Etymology
A respelling of its original name Pearl, a reference to Matthew 13:46. A common backronymic explanation is “Practical Extraction and Reporting Language”.
Meanings
-
A family of high-level programming languages, particularly used for text processing.
Perl attracted the attention of Unix system administrators, who needed a language that was easier to use than the C programming language and more powerful than scripting languages such as Borne^([sic]) and C-shell.
1999, Eric Herrmann, Mastering Perl 5, Sybex, →ISBN, page 5: