Perl was created by Larry Wall as a scripting language that combines features from C, sed, awk, and tcl. It can be used for text processing and system administration tasks. Some key points about Perl include: - Perl scripts have a .pl extension and are executed using the perl command. It supports scalar variables like numbers and strings as well as arrays to hold lists of data. - Common data types in Perl include scalars for single values, arrays for lists, and associative arrays for key-value pairs. Perl also has regular expressions for complex text parsing and manipulation. - Perl provides functions for sorting, reversing, and manipulating arrays. Regular expressions can be used to search for patterns and