name in the book to make it stand out better when typeset. This case distinction was subsequently documented as canonical. The name is occasionally expanded as a backronym: Practical Extraction and Report Language and Wall's own Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister which is in the manual page for perl. History Early versions Larry Wall began work on Perl in 1987, while employed as a programmer at Unisys; he released version 1.0 on December 18, 1987. The language expanded rapidly over the next few years. Perl 2, released in June 1988, featured a better regular expression engine. Perl 3, released in October 1989, added support for binary data streams. Originally, the only documentation for Perl was a single lengthy man page. In 1991, Programming Perl, known to many Perl programmers as the "Camel Book" because of its cover, was published and became the de facto reference for the language. At the same time, the Perl version number was bumped to 4, not to mark a major change in the language but to identify the version that was well documented by the book. Perl 4 was released in March 1991. Early Perl 5 Perl 4 went through a series of maintenance releases, culminating in Perl 4.036 in 1993, whereupon Wall abandoned Perl 4 to begin work on Perl 5. Initial design of Perl 5 continued into 1994. The perl5-porters mailing list was established in May 1994 to coordinate work on porting Perl 5 to different platforms. It remains the primary forum for development, maintenance, and porting of Perl 5. Perl 5.000 was released on October 17, 1994. It was a nearly complete rewrite of the interpreter, and it added many new features to the language, including objects, references, lexical (my) variables, and modules. Importantly, modules provided a mechanism for extending the language without modifying the interpreter. This allowed the core interpreter to stabilize, even as it enabled ordinary Perl programmers to add new language features. Perl 5 has been in active development since then. Perl 5.001 was released on March 13, 1995. Perl 5.002 was released on February 29, 1996 with the new prototypes feature. This allowed module authors to make subroutines that behaved like Perl builtins. Perl 5.003 was released June 25, 1996, as a security release. One of the most important events in Perl 5 history took place outside of the language proper and was a consequence of its module support.