I can only assume you're unfamiliar with the term "backronym" — which is what Perl is, rather than a proper acronym. If you don't believe me, ask Mr. Wall.

In fact, if you're interested in getting this all "right", you might wish to refer back to the writings of Mr. Wall, the inventor of Perl and the man who coined the term Perl in the first place. It might also be of interest to note that the term perl, with a lower-case first letter, arose only because that's what the binary executable Perl parser is called in most unix-based implementations.

Perl is a proper name, as are Ruby, Python, Java, Lisp, Prolog, and a slew of other languages — no matter what their various parser binaries are called.

For purposes of knowing the proper terms, it helps to know the history of the terms.

print substr("Just another Perl hacker", 0, -2);
 - apotheon
CopyWrite Chad Perrin

In reply to Re^4: top ten things every Perl hacker should know by apotheon
in thread top ten things every Perl hacker should know by apotheon

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