How do I go about abstracting URLs?

Question

URL abstraction: www.domain.com/perl.pl to www.domain.com/perl

I am reading MIT's Software Engineering for Internet Applications (specifically, http://philip.greenspun.com/seia/basics ) and the author, Philip Greenspun, mentions URL abstraction but doesn't seem to go into any of the details of actually implementing it.

I'm running Debian with Apache on a localhost, messing around with cgi bin and python. I am wondering:

1. Do I have the tools to abstract URLS?
2. How do I do it?

Answer 1

ReWrite in .htaccess.

http://newmediarts.blogspot.com/2007/01/hide-file-extensions-in-urls-with.html