Introduction

PL/SQL is good for many things. It has a structured, Ada-like syntax and can have SQL statements seamlessly embedded in it. Although not compiled right down to machine code, it’s even fairly quick.

But one thing that most people initially have difficulty doing is displaying information on the screen. The first thing I did was to enter what I wanted into a temporary table and use SQL*Plus to select from it. This works well for reports at the like, but it doesn’t work at all if you want to display something independently of a transaction or halfway through a function.

Introduction

The open source community does a lot of things right. The internals of a program is one of them. The people who write code do so because they are proud of what they do and want the respect of other people in the community. The beauty of the code is a very important aspect in this acceptance.

The same isn’t necessarily true in the commercial world. Time-scales are much more important than how the guts of a computer system looks and it’s generally not good to be seen spending a bit of time making your code look pretty.

Introduction

Many developers would hate to have their master-work described as a mess, but not Larry Wall, creator of Perl and celebrity hacker. The way he sees it, the language is a mess because the problem domain — real life — is also a mess. He has a point.

I first came across Perl a few years ago when I was writing a program that required a certain amount of ‘screen-scraping’ from a telnet session, the ability to retrieve files using FTP, some complex processing and interaction with an Oracle database. This is a fairly messy problem, and one that Perl looked eminently able to solve.