True to the glue language roots of Perl, PDL borrows from several different modules for graphics and plotting support.

PDL provides facilities to read and write many open data formats, including JPEG, PNG, GIF, PPM, MPEG, FITS, NetCDF, GRIB, raw binary files, and delimited ASCII tables.

PDL programmers can use the CPAN Perl I/O libraries to read and write data in hundreds of standard and niche file formats.

Examples of PDL usage for regression modelling tasks include evaluating association between education attainment and ancestry differences of parents,[4] comparison of RNA-protein interaction profiles that needs regression-based normalization[5] and analysis of spectra of galaxies.

[6] An installation of PDL usually comes with an interactive shell known as perldl, which can be used to perform simple calculations without requiring the user to create a Perl program file.