I agree about the CPAN thing.

Perl's a programming language. They've seen programming languages before, they'll see them again.

But I bet they have no idea how enormous CPAN is and all the weird and wonderful stuff that's in it.

Taking something like Lingua::EN::Sentence for instance.

Throw this question out to the class --

What's a sentence? Anything up to a full stop? Nope, not good enough. Anything up to a full stop followed by a space?

Maybe ... maybe not.
        ^^
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OK then, full stop, space, uppercase letter? I'll ask

Mr. Jones
  ^^^
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if he thinks that's smart enough an algorithm. He works for

I.B.M. I think.
     ^^^
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"Wow, that's a lot harder than it looks."

Oh yes and we forgot about quotes, question marks and exclamations.

The point of all this being that someone has sat down and thought really hard about all those things for a really long time and come up with Lingua::EN::Sentence so they don't have to. Plus of course it's easily extensible in case they find something it doesn't catch.

use Lingua::EN::Sentence qw( get_sentences );

$text = "
I agree about the CPAN thing. Perl's a programming language. They've
seen programming languages before, they'll see them again.
But I bet they have no idea how enormous CPAN is and all the weird
and wonderful stuff that's in it. Taking something like
Lingua::EN::Sentence for instance. What's a sentence? Anything 
up to a full stop? Nope, not good enough. Anything up to a full stop 
followed by a space? Maybe ... maybe not. OK then, full
 stop, space, uppercase letter? I'll ask Mr. Jones if he
  thinks that's smart enough an algorithm. He works 
for I.B.M. I think. \"Wow, that's a lot harder than it 
looks.\" Oh yes and we forgot about
quotes, questionmarks and exclamations!";

my $sentences = get_sentences($text);    ## Get the sentences.
foreach my $sentence (@$sentences) {
    print 'SENTENCE: ', $sentence, $/;
}
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