Previous French Perl Workshops demonstrated the ability of Perl to support major industrial and service projects.

We will of course continue to welcome presentations on this topic, but this year, we want to broaden our view by putting the emphasis on the abilities of the Perl language to support research and teaching activities.

Researchers' requirements about computer languages meet perfectly with Perl's characteristics:

• explore many "ways to do it" and prototype quickly,
• get access to a vast centralised repository of well documented modules,
• publish results to the whole community without licensing problems,
• convert a prototype into an industrial application without rewriting, and always without licensing problems,
• easily integrate external libraries or legacy code.

We invite all researchers, engineers, developers who used Perl in a research project to come and tell us about their experience, to illustrate the convergence between sercah work requirements and Perl strengths.

Perl is a simple, powerful and concise language, perfectly usable in teaching situations. Its strenghts in this area are:

• very progressive learning curve: easy things are easy, difficult things are possible,
• very large and freely accessible functional covering tanks to CPAN,
• fast evolution giving access to cutting edge advanced techniques in many areas.

Any teaching experience with Perl will be welcome to enrich our special Perl::For::Teaching session.