-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 11/25/06 17:07, Russ Allbery wrote: > Ron Johnson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: >> On 11/25/06 13:54, Russ Allbery wrote: > >>> It's a back-formation, as is "Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister" >>> (later in the man page). The language is actually named after "Pearl" >>> but since there was already a language named that, Larry Wall dropped >>> the "a". Since then, a few acronyms were made up to fit the letters. > >> Does an official-looking top-of-the-man-page backronym that does not >> indicate that it is a backronym *become* canonical, simply by reason >> that it's at the top of the official man page? > > Well, the Perl developers don't seem to think so given the arguments on > the Perl mailing lists we've had as much as some of the pointless > arguments we have in Debian, but it doesn't really *matter*. :)
True. What matters is that Perl started out as Perl is a interpreted language optimized for scanning arbi- trary text files, extracting information from those text files, and printing reports based on that information. It's also a good language for many system management tasks. The And has wound up being everything for everybody (who likes to swear at the computer[*]). Definitely *not* The Unix Way. * I'm reminded of the day my daughter came in, looked over my shoulder at some Perl 4 code, and said, "What is that, swearing?" -- Larry Wall in <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> - -- Ron Johnson, Jr. Jefferson LA USA Is "common sense" really valid? For example, it is "common sense" to white-power racists that whites are superior to blacks, and that those with brown skins are mud people. However, that "common sense" is obviously wrong. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.5 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFFaNoPS9HxQb37XmcRAjvgAJwJ3gAskF/78aECn1Rc530dWDxxLgCaA6H4 E1EL22exA+5dym1yk5Ho36E= =Uc2o -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]