I believe I was told it is a "Retronym" ;). It was named Pearl because Larry thought it sounded neat, changed it to Perl shortly after finding an existing language named Pearl. Then, later he came up with Practical Extraction and Report Language (interestingly, the "and" works with the orignal name :). I believe that was the stroy I was told :).

In reply to Re^2: improving the aesthetics of perl code by CloneArmyCommander
in thread improving the aesthetics of perl code by tcf03

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