1987: The first version of the Perl programming language is released. Perl was the brainchild of Larry Wall, a programmer at Unisys, who borrowed from existing languages, especially C, to create a ...

A scalar is a single unit of data. That data might be an integer number, floating point, a character, a string, a paragraph, or an entire web page. A literal of the form v1.20.300.4000 is parsed as a ...