Perl (Practical Extraction and Report Language) is a free programming language available for most operating systems,particularly UNIX systems. It was created in 1987 and borrows features from C and from many other programming languages as well. The name is normally capitalized ("Perl") when referring to the languages,but not capitalized ("Perl") when referring to the interpreter. It was designed to be a practical languages to extract information from text files and generate reports and, in general, to make easy tasks easier and difficult tasks possible.