I Need some help for a schoolproject

Hello,

My name is Robin and I am studying computer science. I am working on a project and I am doing some research after ASP. I hope to get some answers here for some questions or else a homepage where I can easily find answers to my questions.

What are the biggest advantages/disadvantages of Perl?
Why should I use Perl, and not PHP, JSP, ASP, or Omnimark?
What are the restriction of Perl?

Thanks in advance,

Robin Riem

Personally I like Perl for a number of reasons, one of which is the Regular Expression support. Perl has the best at that and as far as I am concerned that is a huge advantage. Some of its drawbacks are that:
1. Its slow. Languages like PHP are interpreted and processed much faster. This is partly because every time a CGI script is called a new process must be started. This creates a lot of overhead. The fact that much of Perl abilities comes from its extension modules, new processes are started pretty often. Languages like PHP which have a lot of native functionality are in some cases more desirable. Perl does have, however, an extension which in fact take away the need to start a new process with each calling of the script. mod_perl which can be added and configured in Apache, does this.
2. Some would say Perl is less secure than say PHP. This really depends on the person coding the script though. Someone who is very good with security might be able to code a more secure script with Perl than something else.

Hope this helps.

I agree with everything dsb said and would reinforce the point about regular expressions. If you're doing a job that involves a lot of data searching, particularly if you're extracting certain types of data out of a large mass of text or whatever, Perl's regexps are wonderful. PHP and ASP have regexp support too, but it's just not as elegant.

Perl takes some learning to do it well, but can be extremely slick when done properly. It's quite a subtle language in ways, a lot depends on context etc. Of course, it can also be done dreadfully and has more scope for that than many languages.

More web hosts support Perl than support PHP, though if you've got access to PHP, fine. If you're going to be doing database work then the host will almost certainly have either PHP/MySQL or ASP/Access/SQL Server.

If you want a language solely for web projects then probably PHP is a better one to learn. You will be able to do more with it, more quickly.

Perl is very handy for non-web tasks, automating stuff on Unix servers etc. But how often are you going to want to do that?

On balance if you're starting out and want to do web work, start with PHP, but seriously consider learning Perl later. There are far more similarlities between the two than differences, but both are quite distinct from ASP.