zsdc wrote:
John W. Krahn wrote:
Perl and Unix are not acronyms or abbreviations although LDAP is.
Actually, Perl is an acronym of Practical Extraction and Report Language.
Close, not quite. Larry has a rather perverse sense of humor, and as a concession to the indiscriminate acronymophilia of the day, he allowed as to how the acronym you listed could be applied, just as could be P[adjective I have forgotten] Eclectic Rubbish Lister
You mean Pathological Eclectic Rubbish Lister, which of course is a joke, but the earliest acronym expantion is Practical Extraction and Report Language. (The first name was PEARL, but as it turned out there already was a language called like that.)
This is perl 1.0 manpage from 1987:
NAME perl | Practical Extraction and Report Language
SYNOPSIS perl [options] filename args
DESCRIPTION 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 language is intended to be practical (easy to use, effi- cient, complete) rather than beautiful (tiny, elegant, minimal). It combines (in the author's opinion, anyway) some of the best features of C, sed, awk, and sh, so people familiar with those languages should have little difficulty with it. (Language historians will also note some vestiges of csh, Pascal, and even BASIC|PLUS.) Expression syntax corresponds quite closely to C expression syntax. If you have a problem that would ordinarily use sed or awk or sh, but it exceeds their capabilities or must run a little fas- ter, and you don't want to write the silly thing in C, then perl may be for you. There are also translators to turn your sed and awk scripts into perl scripts. OK, enough hype.
-- ZSDC
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