PERL, an all Purpose Programming Language for Bioinformatics

PERL is an all-purpose programming Language. Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Though Perl is not officially an acronym, there are various backronyms in use, including “Practical Extraction and Reporting Language. Perl is an interpreted language, which means that your code can be run as is, without a compilation stage that creates a nonportable executable program.
Traditional compilers convert programs into machine language. When you run a Perl program, it’s first compiled into a byte code, which is then converted ( as the program runs) into machine instructions. So it is not quite the same as shells, or Tcl, which are strictly interpreted without an intermediate representation.
It is also not like most versions of C or C++, which are compiled directly into a machine-dependent format. It is somewhere in between, along with Python and awk and Emacs .elc files.