What is The Difference Between Perl And Awk, Programming Languages

Perl is an Interpreted Programming Language, while Awk is a Scripting Language

What are Interpreted Programming Languages

An interpreted language is a programming language for which most of its implementations execute instructions directly, without previously compiling a program into machine-language instructions. The interpreter executes the program directly, translating each statement into a sequence of one or more subroutines already compiled into machine code. (Wikipedia)

What are Scripting Languages

Scripting languages are programming languages that control an application. Scripts can execute independent of any other application. They are mostly embedded in the application that they control and are used to automate frequently executed tasks like communicating with external programs.

While Perl is an Interpreted Programming Language, and Awk is a Scripting Language

Let us now look at the difference between the two:

What is Perl Programming Language – A brief synopsis

Perl is a high-level interpreted programming language that supports dynamic programming. It was developed by Larry Wall, a linguist who served as a systems administrator at NASA. It provides the programmers with text processing facilities and has a blend of features adopted from various languages like C, Lisp, and Awk.

What is Awk Programming Language – A brief synopsis

Awk was born in the Bell Labs in the 1970s. It is used for processing text-based data in data streams and files and uses the string datatype, arrays, and regular expressions.