hello all,
this might be a silly question 
I see here a lot of posts about "ATGCTAG..."
is it just a 'lorem ipsum'? or real genetic? both?
I remember having read that perl language has been first designed to help geneticians, or alike (I can't check my sources); am I wrong?
It's scientists or technicians processing snips of gene data I'm pretty sure. We've also had folks here asking for help converting gene data from one proprietary format to another.
Perl wasn't designed specifically for processing genomes though I can certainly believe folks needing to do such processing would've found a powerful regex language like perl immediately useful; gene data is, fundamentally, nothing but giant character strings.
Yes, Perl is very powerful to parse huge amounts of data files, specifically for genome analysis. More and more people have also started using Python for the same tasks, but both languages are good enough for such kind of analysis.
It's not designed for it, but it handles it very well. So well that there's even a special suite of modules and tools for genetics and bioinformatics: BioPerl. It was used pretty extensively in the Human Genome Project.