The community is wrong; and that's the point. Furthermore, the community is not united on this point. Even the manual pages note that "You may or may not choose to follow this usage" with regards to the "Perl" versus "perl" misfeature.

It's simply *BAD ENGLISH* to change the meaning of a word based upon capitalization; and when we destroy the English language, we lose our ability to communicate.

As a form of disambiguation, the method chosen by the community is terrible. What if the word "perl" starts a sentence? It *MUST* be capitalized; and the distinction between the two meanings is instantly lost.

It's excessively confusing, it's noncomformant to English language capitalization standards, and it's simply unacceptable. PERL *is* a correct spelling of the acronym "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language"; anything else is *NOT*. Larry is trying to back away from the acronym he used to promote the language for years, but to this date, "man perl" give me:

perl - Practical Extraction and Report Language

That's about as offical as you can get!

Ruining the English language is simply *NOT* acceptable in exchange for a piece of whimsical jargon whose utility is minimal at best. Changing the meaning of an acronym (even a retrofitted one) years afterwards, and then claiming it's now an "incorrect usage" is equally unworthy of consideration. The community is wrong; Larry is wrong; and some people refuse, quite rightly, to follow conventions that are outright wrong.

---

---

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! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, 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, 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:
	&		&
	<		&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.