Back to the original topic (was Re: Bug in Perl man page)
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On 11/25/06 17:07, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Ron Johnson <ron.l.johnson@cox.net> writes:
>> On 11/25/06 13:54, Russ Allbery wrote:
>
>>> It's a back-formation, as is "Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister"
>>> (later in the man page). The language is actually named after "Pearl"
>>> but since there was already a language named that, Larry Wall dropped
>>> the "a". Since then, a few acronyms were made up to fit the letters.
>
>> Does an official-looking top-of-the-man-page backronym that does not
>> indicate that it is a backronym *become* canonical, simply by reason
>> that it's at the top of the official man page?
>
> Well, the Perl developers don't seem to think so given the arguments on
> the Perl mailing lists we've had as much as some of the pointless
> arguments we have in Debian, but it doesn't really *matter*. :)
True.
What matters is that Perl started out as
Perl is a interpreted language optimized for scanning arbi-
trary text files, extracting information from those text
files, and printing reports based on that information. It's
also a good language for many system management tasks. The
And has wound up being everything for everybody (who likes to swear
at the computer[*]). Definitely *not* The Unix Way.
* I'm reminded of the day my daughter came in, looked over my
shoulder at some Perl 4 code, and said, "What is that, swearing?" --
Larry Wall in <199806181642.JAA10629@wall.org>
- --
Ron Johnson, Jr.
Jefferson LA USA
Is "common sense" really valid?
For example, it is "common sense" to white-power racists that
whites are superior to blacks, and that those with brown skins
are mud people.
However, that "common sense" is obviously wrong.
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