- This article is about the PEARL programming language. For the Perl programming language, see Perl, or for other uses see Pearl (disambiguation).
PEARL, or Process and Experiment Automation Realtime Language, is a computer programming language designed for multitasking and real-time programming. Being a high-level language, it is fairly hardware-independent. Since 1977, the language has been going under several standardization steps by the Deutsches Institut für Normung. The current version is PEARL-90, which was standardized in 1998 as DIN 66253-2.
Features
PEARL supports both fixed-point and floating-point numeric values, character and character string data as well as bit values. It also provides facilities for structures and multi-dimensional arrays. Both typed and untyped pointers are also supported, along with typecasting. As most high-level languages, PEARL supports procedures and functions, and passing parameters to these can be done by value or by reference (via pointers). PEARL is usually written capitalized, and should not be confused with Perl.
