However I find the fact that anyone makes the claim that PERL does not stand for Practical Extraction and Reporting Language to be *historically inaccurate*.
Perl is a practical extraction and reporting language. But that doesn't mean that PERL is an acronym and stands for that. It is a post-facto expansion of a non-acronym. Perl comes from Pearl, which is also not an acronym. The very manual of Perl itself is very clear that the language is Perl, and that PERL should not be written. Your Win32-background may have made you case insensitive, but Perl is not. Everything in Perl is case sensitive. Ever wondered why "use Strict;" does work, but does not do what you mean, in Win32?
You may note that in the first 5 lines Larry himself uses PERL, perl and Perl as well as using the capitalisation Practical Extraction and Report Language.
Not entirely true. The true source of this manual is the POD, not the manual page file itself. You'll note that in the original version, there is no PERL. Manual page names are capitalised because that is tradition. For example, the displayed name for the ls(1) manpage is LS, not ls. That does not make ls LS, or LS a valid alias for ls. In the manual, Perl and perl are often used to differentiate between the language and its implementation, a practice suggested by the FAQ I quoted. The post-facto expansion "Practical Extraction and Report Language" has uppercase letters because of an English phenomenon called titlecase. (There are probably other languages that use it as well. Dutch does not.)
Does it *really* matter?
To me, yes it does. To you: obviously not.
Juerd # { site => 'juerd.nl', plp_site => 'plp.juerd.nl', do_not_use => 'spamtrap' }
In reply to Re^4: MySQL and Perl
by Juerd
in thread MySQL and PERL
by Anonymous Monk
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