From: lwall@jpl-dexxav.JPL.NASA.GOV (Larry Wall)
Newsgroups: news.groups,rec.arts.poems,comp.lang.perl
Subject: CALL FOR DISCUSSION: comp.lang.perl.poems
Date: 1 Apr 90 00:00:00 GMT

[download]
<SNIP> 
print STDOUT q
Just another Perl hacker,
unless $spring

[download]

This is the famous Perl poem by Larry Wall, one of my favourites (the message quoted above, including the poem, appears also in the Camel Book). Unfortunately, it doesn't work in Perl5 anymore, because There can be whitespace between the operator and the quoting characters, except when "#" is being used as the quoting character. (...) (perldoc perlop - a useful feature indeed) , and the newline is a whitespace character.

Now I'm wondering - what is the best way to make this code run again? (I like functional art!). Ideally I'd like to run it unmodified. Simple pure Perl trick to restore q\n...\n functionality? Grab and compile Perl4? Perl4 emulator?

Other than that, I'm considering (with serious reservations) making minor modifications that wouldn't destroy the poem's spirit or visual appearance. Here's one (Anyway I don't like this approach - it's butchery, man!). 

print STDOUT q,
Just another Perl hacker,
unless $spring;

[download]

In reply to q\n...\n still possible? (unless $spring...) by calin

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