It's easy; PHP is/was: <html><body>
<?php echo 'Hello World'; ?>
</body></html>
Whilst the equivalent Perl at the time would be: #!/usr/local/bin/perl
print "Content-Type: text/html\r\n\r\n";
print "<html><body>";
print "Hello world";
print "</body></html>";
or possibly... #!/usr/local/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use CGI;
my $q = CGI->new;
print $q->header('text/html');
print $q->start_html();
print "Hello world";
print $q->end_html();
...if you were being a bit more more fancy.In other words, there was no standard templating; Template Toolkit eventually became a relatively defacto standard, but PHP had already won - and even then, TT had to be manually invoked rather than just going and freestyling <?php> tags everywhere in your HTML and "it just working". In every other respect Perl is & was superior to PHP, and it's really sad to see Perl fade, despite (or because of?) its crazy flexibility and power. |
I am not sure how much of a standard it was, but Perl Mason was a superb web site templating system.
Amazon and many other websites used it for years because it was flexible, high performance, and had fewer security problems compared to PHP.
http://www.masonhq.com/sites
https://masonbook.houseabsolute.com/book/