Perl coming to Android phones
*By François Charette*
[Android is an operating system for mobile phones](http://www.android.com/about/) that runs a modified Linux kernel and
the Java environment. The Android Scripting Environment (ASE) allows you
to edit and execute scripts directly on the Android device. Until now
only Python, Lua and BeanShell were supported, but a [request was filed
to add Perl as well](http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/issues/detail?id=32).
Recently, [support for Perl was added to the development tree](http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/source/browse/#hg/perl), and
today that feature request was closed, and is part of OSE 0.11 alpha.
This means we can
expect that Perl will be officially supported on Android with the next
stable release of the ASE. It will then be possible to write neat Perl
programs on an Android phone, like this ["hello world" example](http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/source/browse/perl/ase/scripts/hello_world.pl).
*François Charette is an independent scholar in the humanities with a passion for Perl.
He is the initiator and co-developer of [Biber](http://biber-biblatex.sourceforge.net), a BibTeX replacement written in
Perl.*