A family of high-level programming languages, particularly used for text processing.
"The system administrator chose Perl to efficiently parse and manipulate the massive log files because it excels at text processing tasks."
The programming language Perl was originally named after the pearl from the parable in Matthew 13:46. Although it is often jokingly described as an acronym for "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language," this is actually a backronym invented later to explain its name.