Vorlesungsankündigung

(Sommersemester 1999)

Craig Smith, M.Sc.:

Perl in Practice


"The world manifests a cacophony of coulds,
and a dearth of dids."

-- Larry Wall

Perl is definitely a 'did'. Perl has become one of the most popular languages in use. It might not have the media coverage that other languages receive, but then again what language would you prefer---one that is most often used by your peers or most often talked about by the media?

(Copied from the PerlFAQ: Copyright (c) 1997 Tom Christiansen and Nathan Torkington. All rights reserved.)

What is Perl?
Perl is a high-level programming language with an eclectic heritage written by Larry Wall and a cast of thousands. It derives from the ubiquitous C programming language and to a lesser extent from sed, awk, the Unix shell, and at least a dozen other tools and languages. Perl's process, file, and text manipulation facilities make it particularly well-suited for tasks involving quick prototyping, system utilities, software tools, system management tasks, database access, graphical programming, networking, and world wide web programming. These strengths make it especially popular with system administrators and CGI script authors, but mathematicians, geneticists, journalists, and even managers also use Perl. Maybe you should, too.
In addition Perl is available for a multitude of operating systems (e.g. Windows, MacOS, Amigos, VMS, and more) and can interact with the specific features of each platform (e.g. modules for OLE, COM, and AppleScript). It's interpreted and garbage collected for rapid development and can be compiled to C for speed. The Internet community has embraced Perl and has helped it quickly become the leader of available tools. CPAN (Comprehensive Perl Archive Network) Internet sites contains library modules for almost any task--parsers, socket libraries, MD5 string encoders, CGI libraries, database interfaces, GUIs, news and mail manipulation are just the tip of the iceberg.

This class will quickly teach the basics of Perl (control flow, strings, hashes, arrays, references, regular expressions) so that we can focus on applying Perl to specific problems. The class will be lectured in English (you can try to ask questions in German but the teacher does not guarantee comprehension) by a native speaker and will use a computer and projector to show Perl in action. The teacher, Craig Smith, has been using Perl since 1993 and has written numerous tools and given many presentations on the subject.



Termin:
Übung: Donnerstag 12.15-14.00 Uhr, V 301