I think that in the original quote, "perl" (lc) refers to the interpreter, and "Perl" (ucfirst) refers to the language. That's the main point I got from the quote. Here's a snippet from perlfaq1:

What's the difference between "perl" and "Perl"?

One bit. Oh, you weren't talking ASCII? :-) Larry now uses "Perl" to signify the language proper and "perl" the implementation of it, i.e. the current interpreter. Hence Tom's quip that "Nothing but perl can parse Perl." You may or may not choose to follow this usage. For example, parallelism means "awk and perl" and "Python and Perl" look OK, while "awk and Perl" and "Python and perl" do not. But never write "PERL", because perl isn't really an acronym, apocryphal folklore and post-facto expansions notwithstanding.

-- Mike

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