Hi Could somebody please tell me what PERL is mainly used for? Really broad question - I realise. I understand it is considered a high-level language - and to me that usually means there's a specific type of approach its particularly good at taking. Bizarrely, at www.perl.com I couldn't find much info about it! Thanks PoW

Don't know about "mainly used". I know what it can be used for: just about anything. Uses I've seen are 1) a good replacement for the Unix shell script/awk/grep/sed stuff. 2) server side CGI. 3) a good substitute for DOS. 4) a simple database The advantage is that it is precompiled before the script is executed so it is a lot faster than most of the script languages and you will know about any errors before the script runs instead of finding out after the script has been running for 5 hours. The only problem with Perl is that there is no right way of writing it. The same thing can be written in a myriad of styles, depending on what the author is used to and what the author knows about the language. It can be quite verbose or extremely terse. In some ways it is worse than any other language I've seen and in some ways it is brilliant: a great contender for another obfuscated programming contest.