The Practical Extraction and Reporting Language (Perl), has grown to be one of the most powerful and popular scripting languages. Combining the best features of C, UNIX utilities, and regular expressions, these days Perl is used for an array of tasks, including system administration, text processing and Web programming. Recently, it's been used for more exotic areas like bioinformatics. Perl is supported by all of the most prominent operating systems, including Windows, Unix, OS/2, Amiga, and others.