| Introduction | Perl is a general purpose high level language popular for CGI scripts. Some of the popular projects in Perl are CPanel and Bugzilla. It was initially designed to replace complex shell scripts. | Python is a widely used general-purpose, high level programming language. Due to its rich library and support, it has wide applications in Web Development, Machine Learning, Desktop Applications, etc. |
| Whitespaces | Perl does not care about whitespaces. | Python deals with whitespaces and a syntax error generates if whitespaces are not according to Python. |
| Focus | Perl accentuates support for common tasks such as report generation and file scanning. | Python accentuates support for common methodologies such as object-oriented programming and data structure design . |
| File Extension | The .pl file extension is used to save Perl Scripts. For example myDocument.pl | The .py file extension is used to save Python Scripts. Example: myFile.py |
| End of Statement | All statements should end with a semi colon in Perl. | It is not necessary to end the statements with a semi colon in Python as it deals with whitespaces. |
| Comments and Documentation | For Inline comments, we use # in Perl.
eg # Inline-Comment in Perl
whereas for documentation we use
= and = cut
eg = Documentation in Perl
starts from here and ends here. = cut | Python also uses # for Inline comments.
eg # Inline-Comment in Python
but for documentation we use
“” ”ie Three inverted commas
eg “” ”Documentation in Python
starts from here and ends here.” ”” |
| Statement Blocks | Perl uses braces to mark the statement blocks. | Python use indentations to mark the statement blocks. |
| Datatypes | Some data types contained by Perl are numeric, string, Scalars, Arrays, Hashes. | Some data types contained by Python are numeric, strings, lists, dictionaries, tuples. |
