Perl is an interpreted language optimized for scanning arbitrary text files, extracting information from those text files, and printing reports based on that information. It's also a good language for many system management tasks. The language is intended to be practical (easy to use, efficient, complete) rather than beautiful (tiny, elegant, minimal).

Perl uses sophisticated pattern matching techniques to scan large amounts of data very quickly. Although optimized for scanning text, Perl can also deal with binary data, and can make dbm files look like associative arrays. Setuid Perl scripts are safer than C programs through a dataflow tracing mechanism which prevents many stupid security holes.

Perl for Win32 is a port of most of the functionality in Perl, with extra Win32 API calls so that you can take advantage of native Windows functionality.

Perl for Win32 runs on Windows 95 and Windows NT 3.5 and later.   NOTE: Most (if not all) of the data here is tested on Windows NT Server 4 and IIS 3.0.

The Perl for Win32 package contains perl.exe, perlx00.dll and documentation that is usually of little help. There are also extensions that allow you to call Win32 functionality.

Perl for ISAPI is an ISAPI DLL that runs Perl scripts in process with Microsoft IIS (Internet Information Server). Generally, ISAPI dll files are faster than their cgi counterparts.

The PerlScript package is the latest member of the family and is an ActiveX scripting engine. It allows you to write PerlScript code for any ActiveX host. Currently those include Internet Explorer 3.0 and IIS 3.0.