CSE graduate enrichment seminar

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                               Mini Perl 
                   A Quick Introduction to the Language

                             by Jim Hayes (CSE)
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                        brought to you in part by 
                   Graduate Student Association at UCSD


                            AP&M room 4301
                       Wednesday 5/16/01 at 12:30pm


Most programmers' introduction to the Perl language comes in the context
of writing CGI scripts.  However, Perl has many characteristics that make
it a valuable tool for general purpose programming.  The language is both
compact and expressive, making it possible to write small programs that
are both powerful and easy to maintain.  Perl's extensive pattern matching
support makes it ideal for text filtering programs.  Built-in library
access provides most of the system calls available to C programs, and the
Perl/Tk module provides the same GUI features available in Tcl.  Finally,
Perl's modularity mechanisms, combined with a large base of fanatic fans
of the language, means that the amount of pre-packaged functionality
available to Perl programmers is constantly growing. 

This talk will outline the main features of Perl.  After a brief overview
of the language syntax (which is similar to that of C) and philosophy,
we'll focus on Perl's support for modularity, object-oriented programming,
and Tk.  Use of these features will be illustrated using a typically small
Perl project -- a 100-line GUI program that allows filtering of mail
stored on a POP3 server.