Which Pearl?

[blazar]

We've all (well, not really...) heard that Perl is at most a backronym, due to the fact that it should have been Pearl in the first place, except that there was already a programming language going by that name and $Larry wanted to avoid confusion.

Now, I've just discovered the HOPL (History of Programming Languages) which is, or aims at being, as complete and full of info and precise (while staying minimal in terms of UI and visual appearance) as possible: for pearl it finds five programming languages (with different capitalizations!) and I wonder which is the one we must thank (and I say so seriously, since I believe that "perl" is much better than "pearl") for the actual naming of our beloved language.

Incidentally (but not too much,) the page for Perl at HOPL is particularly inaccurate, especially if compared with other languages: see e.g. Python or Ruby. Double clicking in any point of a page seemingly turns up a page editing form, but AIUI it's not a wiki just as much as a system for suggesting a change, that will be taken into account or not: maybe it's just me, but I couldn't find at the site any document describing the exact policy in this regard. However I hope that someone (better entitled to do so than I am) will concoct up a more precise page for Perl...

[talexb]

Based on the Perl (2355/per004) title on the HOPL site, I presume that the article's actually talking about Perl 4 -- so don't fret.

I bet we could provide a much more interesting entry for Perl 5, since that's the version that is now being used for the majority of applications.

[blazar]

I personally believe

While most people would say that Perl 5 and Perl 4 (as opposed to Perl 6 wrt Perl 5) are two versions of the same language, what you propose would certainly be sensible. I think that there does not exist an extremely strict policy on "this kind of things." Just to be fussy I would note that whatever the title says, the main text does mention Perl 5, but not to the point of amending the vastly incorrect information it reports. Having a separate Perl 5 entry, would still require to correct the current Perl 4 ("and previous") one anyway. Again, the approach seems sensible, since e.g. both diagrams at "diagram & history of programming languages" are precisely following it. Incidentally, the diagram "extracted" from HOPL is much more impressive than any other one I have seen thus far, and gives an idea of how rich the project is, and of its accuracy, thus it strikes as even more unfortunate that Perl is not treated adequately! Fortunately, wiki-like mechanism or not, there's a reference email address available.

Thus I propose that:

1. a first mail is sent to the maintainer to ask whether two separate entries for Perl (meaning "Perl 4" or less) and Perl 5 respectively would be preferred over a single one or vice versa;
2. we concoct up here, collectively, a good text for the new entries (or entry) in accordance with HOPL's style.

I believe that the latter task could be accomplished by means of followups to the root node of this very thread, of which I must say, however, that unfortunately doesn't seem to have gained enough momentum to be the best "place" to do so; so, if you know of a better one, I'm all open to suggestions. In the meanwhile, since it was me to bring all this up, I may send the first mail myself anytime soon now.

[jethro]

What do you think is inaccurate in the description? I see the following points:

The first sentence 'AWK-like language' is wrong.

I think perl4 had already nested data structures !?

Nice would be to add that perl5 is still continuing to evolve and new features are added to it.

Anything else?