Many people consider Perl to stand for Practical Extraction and Report Language. This isn’t strictly true as Larry Wall originally wanted to call the language Pearl, but he discovered there was already a language that went by that name (PEARL, or Process and experiment automation realtime language, a language created about ten years before Perl).
Practical Extraction and Report Language is actually a backronym, but it does serve to hammer home the point that Perl is well known as an extraction language. In order to extract data, you need ...
