I was reading your question and thought to myself "probably some idiot thought it looked cute"... and then I noticed that it was Time::Limit, so that idiot was me!

Yeah, I probably thought it looked cute, or would stand out better, or something like that. It achieves nothing over a single negation.

In the case of overloaded objects, it actually could return something different from a single negation, but fork ain't likely to ever return an overloaded object.

Cargo cult? Playing safe? Who knows ! :)

edit

Disclaimer: I'm not aware of any special magic of fork , but who knows .. it's Perl ;)

I'm guessing it's there for readability. Someone might have missed the negation once before and figured out that by adding two more exclamation marks the logic stays the same, but he will not miss it the second time. So it's there for emphasis, like 'NOT' instead of 'not' in a plain text sentence. This would be my guess.

I would probably just use 'unless'.

Considering the previous responses, I'll throw my 2p in.

I prefer the named operators, such as not to !, because they don't disappear as easily into the punctuation forest that Perl sometimes turns into.

(Which makes me think that not not would be the named unary positive operator for booleans, just like + is the positive sign operator. Maybe a nice alias like aye instead?)

No, not not can't be used as a non-punctuation equivalent to the unary +.

not not 2 is equal to 1.

toby döt ink

Yes, agreed. I was thinking of Booleans, where it's not an issue. Though my telepathy is in the shop this week.

-QM
--
Quantum Mechanics: The dreams stuff is made of