"Perl" itself came first, after Larry decided not to name the language after his wife (Gloria), he dismissed all three letter words from the dictionary, and dropped Pearl because there was already a language with that name.

The backronyms you mention date from a later, but not much later - they are both mentioned in the manual page that came with perl 1.

In reply to Re: History of Perl expansion by JavaFan
in thread History of Perl expansion by irah

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