Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Short for Practical Extraction and Report Language, Perl is a programming language developed by Larry Wall, especially designed for processing text. Because of its strong text processing abilities, Perl has become one of the most popular languages for writing CGI scripts. Perl is an interpretive language, which makes it easy to build and test simple programs. 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. 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 programming languages" due to its flexibility and power. It is also referred to as the "duct tape that holds the Internet together", in reference to its ubiquity and perceived inelegance.