in reply to History of Perl expansion

"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.

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Re^2: History of Perl expansion
by haoess (Curate) on Feb 25, 2009 at 11:54 UTC

    Looks like the second one was added by TimToady itself:

    $ git blame pod/perl.pod | grep Pathologically
a0d0e21e (Larry Wall              1994-10-17 23:00:00 +0000 455) Perl 
+actually stands for Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister, but

    [download]

    -- Frank

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