Re: Re: Perl and Unix versus PERL and UNIX

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Re: Re: Re: Perl and Unix versus PERL and UNIX by chromatic (Archbishop) on Mar 07, 2003 at 17:57 UTC
From perlfaq1: 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.	[reply]
Re: Perl and Unix versus PERL and UNIX by Abigail-II (Bishop) on Mar 07, 2003 at 23:49 UTC
I beg to differ on the "long after the language was named" part, unless Larry named Perl long before releasing it in the wild. The manual page released with the very first version of Perl, version 1.0.0, says: `PERL(1) PERL(1) NAME perl - Practical Extraction and Report Language` [download] Abigail	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Re: Re: Perl and Unix versus PERL and UNIX by runrig (Abbot) on Mar 07, 2003 at 20:39 UTC
It should be noted that expansion of 'perl' as an acronym was invented long after the language was named. True enough, but its understandable that people think its the acronym (instead of a "backronym" or "retronym") when the first thing they see in "perldoc perl" is: `PERL(1) 2002-06-10 (perl v5.6.1) PERL(1) NAME perl - Practical Extraction and Report Language` [download]	[reply] [d/l]