Perl is...

Perl is...
o a cross-platform programming language
o an open source software
o Y2K compliant
o listed in Oxford English Dictionary (OED)
o has features of C,awk,sed,sh,basic
o equipped with DBI modules for interfacing with 3rd party databases like Oracle, mySQL etc
o supports procedural and object-oriented programming
o supports Unicode
o works with HTML, XML and other markup languages
o even interfaces with external C/C++ libraries using XS or SWIG