Translation of "Practical Extraction and Report Language" into English

An interpreted language, based on C and several UNIX utilities. Perl has powerful string-handling features for extracting information from text files. Perl can assemble a string and send it to the shell as a command; therefore, it is often used for system administration tasks. A program in Perl is known as a script. Perl was devised by Larry Wall at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.