Re^2: Some Help for a Report About Perl

That's another absolutely huge one, and in fact, Perl has dictated its own widely-used standard: "Perl Compatible Regular Expression" (PCRE). I agree with the typewriter monkey if not used well.

One distribution I've contributed to a few times over the years is Email::Valid. Check out this regex that's part of it. By far, it is not poorly written, but in the past in a ticket or a patch, another contributor stated (paraphrased as I can't recall the exact wording), 'I'm not touching that regex; it's a thing that is made of nightmares' :)

Another thing, Perl is the "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language".

Comment on Re^2: Some Help for a Report About Perl

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^3: Some Help for a Report About Perl by Discipulus (Canon) on Nov 01, 2017 at 20:36 UTC
> it's a thing that is made of nightmares This is part of hard things possible infact if you watch it from left: comply with an entire (or more) RFC in just one statement is an hard goal to achieve! L* There are no rules, there are no thumbs.. Reinvent the wheel, then learn The Wheel; may be one day you reinvent one of THE WHEELS.	[reply] [d/l]
Re^4: Some Help for a Report About Perl by stevieb (Canon) on Nov 01, 2017 at 20:38 UTC
...and that, because in a past life I knew nearly the whole RFC by heart, is one damned hard thing that became possible in literally, a single scalar variable.	[reply]
Re^3: Some Help for a Report About Perl by eyepopslikeamosquito (Archbishop) on Nov 05, 2017 at 04:33 UTC
Another thing, Perl is the "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language" Please be aware that the name "Perl" is not an acronym. From learn.perl.org: "Perl" is the name of the language. Only the "P" is capitalized. The name of the interpreter (the program which runs the Perl script) is "perl" with a lowercase "p" ... But never write "PERL", because perl is not an acronym. Larry originally chose the name "Perl" -- after going through every single word in the dictionary! -- arbitrarily for its positive connotations. Actually, he originally chose "Pearl", but that name was already taken. So your "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language" is a backronym, invented after Larry had already chosen the name. One source for this is the draft Oxford English Dictionary entry: Perl Brit. Perl, perl, irreg. PERL Computing. perl n. , arbitrarily chosen for its positive connotations, with omission of -a- to differentiate it from an existing programming language called Pearl. Coined by Larry Wall in the summer of 1987; the program was publicly released on 18 December of that year. Acronymic expansions of the name (such as Practical Extraction and Report Language and Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister), though found in the earliest documention for the language, were formed after the name had been chosen. Coinage details confirmed by personal communication from L. Wall, May 2000. A high-level interpreted programming language widely used for a variety of tasks and especially for applications running on the World Wide Web. The form Perl is preferred for the language itself; perl is used for the interpreter for the Perl language.	[reply]