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 cross-platform. 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.
PEARL is not to be confused with the similarly named Perl, an entirely unrelated programming language.
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.
PEARL is a higher programming language, which allows a comfortable, secure and almost processor independent programming of multitasking- and realtime problems and has been standardized since 1977 at various stages of its development, the last time 1998 as PEARL-90 (DIN 66253-2 1998, Berlin, Beuth-Verlag, 1998).
Besides the simple possibility to map process technical problems, an important principle at the development of PEARL was the easy learning by the programmer. Everyone who already knows a procedural programming language will get acquainted with PEARL in a very short time.
All basic data types and language structures of other procedural programming languages exist in PEARL. In addition PEARL offers comfortable language elements for the handling of multitasking- and realtime tasks.
Like most other high-level languages, PEARL supports procedures and functions, and passing parameters to these can be done by value or by reference (via pointers).