As with many things in the Unix universe, the saying, "Nothing can parse Perl except perl" is case-sensitive. The saying means, "Nothing can parse the language of Perl except the executable called perl."
The Windows equivalent would be: "Nothing can parse Perl except PERL.EXE."
The saying is NOT trying to suggest that a Perl script can flawlessly parse Perl language snippets. That is a common misconception and misunderstanding. A parser written in Perl can do a lot, but any parser you're likely(*) to write in Perl will fail to parse all of the Perl language.
The wisdom in this koan is to realize that the Perl language is so crufty with special-cases and funky exceptions to its own grammars that it would be folly to try to parse any Perl script by writing a parser from scratch. Even the human brain can't always parse Perl in many cases. You'll get hung up on the many years of grammar evolution.
(*) Unless you're implementing Perl6, which is really just using Perl6 to plan Perl6.
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The Windows equivalent would be: "Nothing can parse Perl except PERL.EXE."
Funnily enough, my Perl executable is named 'perl.exe'.
The nice thing is though--just as in english where 'The', 'the', 'THE', 'tHe' etc. all have the same meaning, though some are more acceptable than others in some circumstances--I can type 'Perl', 'perl', 'PERL', the classic 'pERL', or any other combination and they all find my executable. Neat huh.
I guess you could set up 15 alias' or symlinks :).
Examine what is said, not who speaks.
"Efficiency is intelligent laziness." -David Dunham
"Think for yourself!" - Abigail
"Memory, processor, disk in that order on the hardware side. Algorithm, algorithm, algorithm on the code side." - tachyon
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An interesting aside, I suppose, but doesn't seem particularly germaine to the discussion.
I never claimed Windows was case-sensitive, although it is (mostly) case-preserving. I merely said that like Unix, the adage depends on the use of the distinction between capital and lowercase letters to impart its full meaning.
It's okay, sometimes I wake up grouchy and decide to be a contrarian just for the sake of disagreeing with people on the tiniest of nits, too.
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-just as in english where 'The', 'the', 'THE', 'tHe' etc. all have the same meaning
"tHe" is not English! "The" and "the" also have different meanings, "The" indicates the start of a sentence!
Case-sensitivity also matters elsewhere in English, consider the implications of "He" vs "he" when talking about God.
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