Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language.

Though Perl is not officially an acronym, there are various backronyms in usage, such as: Practical Extraction and Reporting Language. Perl was originally developed by Larry Wall in 1987 as a general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier. Since then, it has undergone many changes and revisions and become widely popular amongst programmers. Larry Wall continues to oversee development of the core language, and its upcoming version, Perl 6. Perl borrows features from other programming languages including C, shell scripting (sh), AWK, and sed. The language provides powerful text processing facilities without the arbitrary data length limits of many contemporary Unix tools, facilitating easy manipulation of text files. Perl gained widespread popularity in the late 1990s as a CGI scripting language, in part due to its parsing abilities.

In addition to CGI, Perl is used for graphics programming, system administration, network programming, finance, bioinformatics, and other applications. Perl is nicknamed "the Swiss Army chainsaw of scripting languages" because of its flexibility and power. In 1998, it was also referred to as the "duct tape that holds the Internet together", in reference to its ubiquity and perceived inelegance.

Larry Wall (born September 27, 1954) is a programmer and author, most widely known for his creation of the Perl programming language in 1987.

Wall grew up in south Los Angeles and then Bremerton, Washington before starting higher education at Seattle Pacific University in 1976, majoring in chemistry and music and later premed with a hiatus of several years working in the university's computing center before graduating with a self-styled bachelor's degree in Natural and Artificial Languages.

While in graduate school at UC Berkeley, Wall and his wife were studying linguistics with the intention afterwards of finding an unwritten language, perhaps in Africa, and creating a writing system for it. They would then use this new writing system to translate various texts into the language, among them the Bible. Due to health reasons these plans were cancelled, and they remained in the U.S., where Larry instead joined the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory after he finished graduate school.

Wall is the author of the rn Usenet client and the nearly universally-used patch program. He has won the International Obfuscated C Code Contest twice and was the recipient of the first Free Software Foundation Award for the Advancement of Free Software in 1998.

Paul Joseph Fenwick (born 25 August 1969 in London, England) is a retired Canadian international association football player.

Fenwick played in Canada for Hamilton Steelers and Winnipeg Fury, in England for Birmingham City and in Scotland for Dunfermline Athletic,St. Mirren,Greenock Morton,Raith Rovers (on loan) and Hibernian.

Fenwick made his debut for Canada in a June 1994 friendly match against Holland and went on to earn a total of 33 caps, scoring no goals. He has represented Canada in 6 FIFA World Cup qualification matches and played in the 1996, 2000 and the 2003 CONCACAF Gold Cup.

His final international was a November 2003 friendly match against Ireland.

Hille Perl (born in Bremen in 1965) is a German virtuoso performer of the viola da gamba and lirone. She is considered to be one of the world's finest viola da gamba players, specializing in solo and ensemble music of the 17th and 18th centuries. She has a particular interest in French Baroque repertoire for seven-string bass viola da gamba, which she plays with an almost vocal, yet refined tone. She also performs Spanish, Italian and German repertoire for the instrument and has released several CDs.

Her long-time performing partner is Lee Santana, who plays the lute, theorbo, chitarrone, and baroque guitar. She plays a seven-string Tielke replica made by Ingo Muthesius and a six-string Italian gamba made by Claus Derenbach.

Her father Helmuth Perl was a musicologist who specialized in Mozart. She decided to play the viola da gamba after attending a Wieland Kuijken concert when she was five years old. She studied with Ingrid Stampa. Her daughter Marthe is a viol player too.

Perl lives in northern Germany and teaches at the University of the Arts Bremen.

Georg Philipp Telemann (14 March 1681 – 25 June 1767) was a German Baroque composer and multi-instrumentalist. Almost completely self-taught in music, he became a composer against his family's wishes. After studying in Magdeburg, Zellerfeld, and Hildesheim, Telemann entered the University of Leipzig to study law, but eventually settled on a career in music. He held important positions in Leipzig, Żary, Eisenach, and Frankfurt before settling in Hamburg in 1721, where he became musical director of the city's five main churches. While Telemann's career prospered, his personal life was always troubled: his first wife died only a few months after their marriage, and his second wife had extramarital affairs and accumulated a large gambling debt before leaving Telemann.

Telemann was one of the most prolific composers in history (at least in terms of surviving oeuvre) and was considered by his contemporaries to be one of the leading German composers of the time—he was compared favorably both to his friend Johann Sebastian Bach, who made Telemann the Godfather and namesake of his son Carl Philipp Emanuel, and to George Frideric Handel, whom Telemann also knew personally. Telemann's music incorporates several national styles: French, Italian, and Polish. He remained at the forefront of all new musical tendencies and his music is an important link between the late Baroque and early Classical styles.