VANCOUVER, British Columbia – May 11, 2004 – Perl heads InfoWorld's list of the most powerful, useful tools for IT departments, and ActiveState's ActivePerl implementation is specifically recommended as "the best available for the Win32 platform."
The article, compiled by InfoWorld's Test Center analysts, states, "Perhaps there has never been a more malleable, yet simple language than Perl – traits that have made it indispensable on Unix systems. Combining the portability of a shell language, simple database interfaces, surprising speed, and a world-class regular expression engine, Perl has become the duct tape that holds networks together. It's that most important type of tool: one for building other tools.
"Perl isn't limited to the Linux/Unix world, either; plenty of time and effort has been put into making it run on Windows. ActiveState's ActivePerl implementation is generally regarded as the best available for the Win32 platform. Its PPM (Perl Package Manager) emulates the Unix version's CPAN (Comprehensive Perl Archive Network) access, pulling add-on modules from the Internet on request. Plenty of Windows-specific functions are also available."
