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In English Wikipedia it is written, "Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language." Perl, originally developed by Larry Wall, is a scripting language, which in a simple language means that you execute a code not in its binary form with help of the programming environment. You can edit the code anytime and run it without need to compile it. Although the Perl programming language is free (it comes from Unix), Windows users may find it complicated, as running Perl scripts requires the availability of the whole Perl environment on your disk. Some people might even say that it is absolutely useless to convert Perl scripts to executable binaries even in Unix, but in embedded Unix environments this solution is definitely good, as it saves space. Albeit some of the Perl Windows versions are commercial, you will find free versions too; but instead of downloading the huge environment you can use Perl2Exe, a command line tool for converting Perl scripts to EXE files. Perl, unlike any other programming language, has one advantage over all other programming languages - it makes wonders with texts. Some years ago I made a spell checker, but not the one like we all are familiar with. I developed a spell checker that would save all peculiar words to a file in a few seconds if compared against a wordlist of any choice. With too many unknown words in a text document of several thousand words you will need to click on the Add or Ignore button for quite a long time in editors like OpenOffice.org or MS Word. What to do in a situation you need to edit a book with profiles of hundreds of medicinal herbs, weaponry, drugs, or chemical components? How to make a big - ad hoc dictionary without wasting time in time-consuming clicking? You can use the Webster dictionary in TXT format, which is available in many FTP archives (Unix) - search for the text strings: "web2" and "web2a". When you compare your text file (must be in the TXT format - you can export any document as TXT easily from OpenOffice.org or MS Word) with hundreds of unfamiliar words against this Webster dictionary, for example, the script will write to a file all words that are not in the Webster dictionary. This means that the words like Chichen Itza or Abhaya will get to the output file (your custom dictionary), which you may then put to Microsoft Word. A few Perl scripts similar to the one I made - that can be used for building up of dictionaries - can be found on the Internet, but if you have no luck, try this link: reality with Perl Spell Checker and download the text file “Perl Spell Checker” at the top of the above page. Although I did not write this one, it does the same job as the one I had developed (I did not include mine because I was lazy to rewrite my non-English comments). There are thousands and thousands of freely available Perl scripts on the Internet. With Perl2Exe, you may convert them to binary EXE files in Windows even in case you do not wish to learn the Perl programming language, and what is good is that you do not need to download the complex Perl environment like Indigo Perl, ActivePerl, etc. Perl2Exe is a little program but simple for users not experienced with Perl and its Lite version is free. You have a script - spell.txt in my case. If you use Perl2Exe, you will produce the file spell.exe, which will do the same job as spell.pl or spell.txt (I chose the *.txt format only because it is more browser-friendly). The Lite version of Perl2Exe is not time limited; however, the Pro version has more features not available in the Lite version. The benefit of Perl2Exe is that you will easily use any Perl script in Windows. Are you looking for free software? Just examine various software databases with thousands of Perl scripts and use them! Is it not simple? The author's website about FreeBSD and OpenBSD
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perl2exe, Unix, Perl, scripts, programming, spell checker,
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