Perl is the Swiss Army chainsaw of programming languages: powerful and adaptable. It was first developed by Larry Wall, a linguist working as a systems administrator for NASA in the late 1980s, as a way to make report processing easier. Since then, it has moved into a several other areas: automating system administration, acting as glue between different computer systems, web programming, bioinformatics, data munging, and even application development[5]. | ||
| --A Beginner's Introduction to Perl 5.10 | ||
My choice of Perl for writing this program was a result of several factors. First and foremost is that Perl was written specifically for dealing with text processing. In fact, Perl stands for Practical Extraction and Reporting Language. Although Perl has progressed immensly since it was first conceived with this goal in mind it is still probably the best choice for dealing with bulk textual data.
Secondly Perl has amazing regular expression capabilities[6]. As throughout the project I would be dealing with extensive pattern matching this was a major factor in the choice of language.