Editing Portal:Artificial Intelligence (section)

=== PDL and numeric computing ===

Scientific and numerical AI work usually requires arrays, matrices, and vectorized operations. Perl’s answer to this has long been the '''Perl Data Language''' or '''PDL'''. PDL is a Perl extension designed for scientific and bulk numeric data processing and display. Its documentation describes multidimensional array handling and vectorized computation.<ref>MetaCPAN, “PDL - The Perl Data Language,” https://metacpan.org/pod/PDL, accessed July 3, 2026.</ref>

PDL is important to Perl’s AI story because machine learning is fundamentally data-oriented. Even when Perl is not used to train a large neural network, it can still prepare data, inspect arrays, transform matrices, process images, generate features, or validate model outputs. PDL also connects Perl to scientific computing, which overlaps with AI in fields such as image processing, signal processing, simulation, statistics, and bioinformatics.