not PERL, it is not an acronym
You do know that the perl manual page disagrees with you, don't you? From the current blead:
=head1 DESCRIPTION
Perl officially stands for Practical Extraction and Report Language, except when it doesn't.
...
Perl actually stands for Pathological Eclectic Rubbish Lister, but don't tell anyone I said that.
Are you doubting the written words of Larry? The last phrase actually dates from the manual page of Perl 1.0. Which also mentions Practical Extraction and Report Language. Except that it does so in the NAME section, not the first line of DESCRIPTION.
Only if you send in a patch to p5p to remove the acronyms from the documentation, and get the patch accepted, I'll belief any claims Perl isn't an acronym. Otherwise, it's just your word against Larry's (who has the backing of p5p), and their word carries a lot more than yours.
| [reply] |
| [reply] |
Can you be a bit more specific? That page contains a bunch of links. A quick sampling of the ones with a more promising title does not reveal anything that suggests the manual page is wrong. Perhaps you're referring to the question that says What's the difference between "perl" and "Perl"?, and for which the answer is:
One bit. Oh, you weren't talking ASCII? :-) Larry now uses ``Perl'' to signify the language proper and ``perl'' the implementation of it, i.e. the current interpreter. Hence Tom's quip that ``Nothing but perl can parse Perl.'' You may or may not choose to follow this usage. For example, parallelism means ``awk and perl'' and ``Python and Perl'' look ok, while ``awk and Perl'' and ``Python and perl'' do not.
I guess it would be better to link to a more current version of said question. For instance, current blead answers the question as:
"Perl" is the name of the language. Only the "P" is capitalized.
The name of the interpreter (the program which runs the Perl script)
is "perl" with a lowercase "p".
You may or may not choose to follow this usage. But never write "PERL",
because perl is not an acronym.
Now, I grant you, that says perl isn't an acronym. But if there's contradicting documentation, on the one hand we have have the Perl manual page, claiming something since perl-1.0, and maintained by p5p, and on the other hand we have a contradicting opinion from a document that's moderated by a single person, and is imported from CPAN, guess which one I consider should carry more weight?
Now, I don't care jack shit whether Perl is written as perl, PERL, PeRl or someway else, or whether it's an acronym or not, but I do get pissed off at people who think they should belittle others when they assume Perl is an acronym.
Fix your bloody documentation first, then tell others off .
| [reply] |