I am just reading Nigel Chapman's book Perl: the programmer's companion, and am intrigued by the epilogue. It's an (imaginary) coffee shop conversation between three programming experts, called Harry, Ed and Bernie, and the reader is invited to work out their true identities (plus that of the waiter) on the basis of their comments. Seeing as the author's hints didn't give much away, and as I lack a comp sci background, I thought I'd turn to the Monks for their thoughts. My guesses are that "Harry" is Larry Wall, "Bernie" is Bjarne Soustrup and the waiter is Chapman himself (about "Ed" I have no idea). Am I close? Or is there, as one might expect for a Perl-related question, More Than One Way To Answer It?

In reply to Who are those masked men in Chapman's book? by mooseboy

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.