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in reply to Origins of the name Perl?
in thread Perl falls victim to shifting trends

Actually, Perl comes from Pearl, which was what Larry used after he dropped the idea of using Gloria, his wife's first name, as name for the language. But Pearl is indeed a backronym for Practical Extraction And Report Language.

Makeshifts last the longest.

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Re: Origins of the name Perl?
by Abigail-II (Bishop) on Nov 13, 2002 at 16:28 UTC
    Furthermore, Larry switched from "Pearl" to "Perl" after finding out "Pearl" was already the name of an existing language. (Legends go that it's the name of a language to do graphics in - it may be so, but I know there's also a language to write real time programs in that's called "Pearl").

    Abigail

[reply]
      Hi,

      Pearl is in fact the name of a (not-very-elegant) programming language you may use for robotics. My first contact with Perl was indeed, when I learned Perl and then came into the course, where they expected people to know Pearl. Man - I nearly collapsed. Then - they allowed to program either in C or Pearl.

      Me and a guy took the C, the rest of the class Pearl, we finished 90% of the exercises, the Pearl-people 30-40%. So you really aren't interested in this language. :-)

      Oh well - if you are: Look here

      Bye
       PetaMem

[reply]
        I've a list of languages, and that list has no less than four languages called 'Pearl':
        • Constable, Cornell U, 80's. Constructive mathematics.
        • Process and Experiment Automation Real-Time Language. A real-time language for programming process control systems, widely used in Europe. Size and complexity exceeds Ada. DIN 66253 Teil 2, "Programmiersprache PEARL", Beuth-Verlag, Nov. 1980.
        • One of five pedagogical languages based on Markov algorithms, used in "Nonpareil, a Machine Level Machine Independent Language for the study of Semantics", B. Higman, ULICS Intl Report No ICSI 170, U London (1968).
        • Brian Randell, ca 1970. Multilevel language, mentioned in Machine Oriented Higher Level Languages, W. van der Poel, N-H, 1974.

        The second one on this list the one you are referring to. Note also that the list I'm referring to dates from January 1995. There may be more Pearls now....

        Abigail

[reply]

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