Re^3: MySQL and Perl

Must be my Win32 background. I am not case sensitive. I find argumants about perl, PERL, Perl a waste of time. 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*. Download the original Perl 1 source from here Within it you can easily grep the man page which is:

.TH PERL 1 LOCAL
.SH NAME
perl - Practical Extraction and Report Language
.SH SYNOPSIS
.B perl [options] filename args
.SH DESCRIPTION
.I Perl
is a interpreted language optimized for scanning arbitrary text files,
extracting information from those text files, and printing reports bas
+ed
on that information.
[download]

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.

So call it what you want and say it means whatever you like. Does it *really* matter? Can I extract one gram worth of extra meaning from how someone capitalises pErL? OK so that looks script kiddie to me :-) Could you blame Larry for the 'confusion' by using PERL, perl, Perl, and Practical Extraction and Report Language in the first 5 lines of the original man page.

cheers

tachyon

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Re^4: MySQL and Perl by Juerd (Abbot) on Jul 21, 2004 at 13:19 UTC
I see now that I posted the part from the FAQ as a reply to your reply, allthough it was intended as a reply to the original post. I'm sorry for any confusion that this may have caused. 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' }	[reply]
Re^5: MySQL and Perl by gellyfish (Monsignor) on Jul 21, 2004 at 13:28 UTC
Except of course that the source of the manual until perl 5 was a `perl.man` that was right there in the source distribution. And it was indeed troff+man macros... /J\	[reply] [d/l]