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] |
Can you be a bit more specific?
Happy to: the only place in the documentation that says "PERL" is perlfaq1, which says "never write 'PERL'".
I don't care if you think "Perl" is an acronym, but that doesn't make "PERL" the name of the language.
(I agree there's no reason to belittle someone who gets it wrong, but I won't hire anyone who doesn't know the name of the language—or doesn't care about details to get it right.)
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Happy to: the only place in the documentation that says "PERL" is perlfaq1, which says "never write 'PERL'".
Not actually, in the version of the faq you were linking to. But I already pointed that out.
I don't care if you think "Perl" is an acronym, but that doesn't make "PERL" the name of the language.
See, that's the point. The justification the current version of the perlfaq uses for not writing it as PERL is the claim it's not an acronym. What's someone to do with a statement of which the premises appears not to be true?
I won't hire anyone who doesn't know the name of the language
If someone is good, and appears to fit the rest of the company, I hire them. For all I care, he spells the name of the language as Python. OTOH, I would not hire someone who makes a big deal about the capitalization of the name of a language.
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