Okay, this may not be that big of a deal, but it kinda bothers me...
What is it with people spelling Perl, PERL and Unix, UNIX? I know for sure that Perl is not spelled with all caps. But I still see books and articles spell it PERL. What about Unix? Should it be all caps?
I know to avoid job ads for PERL programmers. Maybe I'm wrong, but if you can't spell Perl right, then why should I work for you? |
Re: Perl and Unix versus PERL and UNIX
by jasonk (Parson) on Mar 07, 2003 at 17:29 UTC
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In the case of Perl, I think it's just because of the acronym that people assume it should always be upper case. As for UNIX, the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (http://foldoc.doc.ic.ac.uk) says:
"Unix" or "UNIX"? Both seem roughly equally popular, perhaps with a historical bias towards the latter. "UNIX" is a registered trademark of The Open Group, however, since it is a name and not an acronym, "Unix" has been adopted in this dictionary except where a larger name includes it in upper case. Since the OS is case-sensitive and exists in many different versions, it is fitting that its name should reflect this.
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Whether or not perl is an acronym (which has been disputed in this thread and others that I know of), acronyms often get adopted into the language as words unto themselves.
For example, consider SCUBA and LASER. Both words started as acronyms, but by now it's very unusual to see them in all caps. You're a lot more likely to see them as regular words. e.g., "Shoot the scuba gear with the laser (to make unhappy divers)."
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Re: Perl and Unix versus PERL and UNIX
by hardburn (Abbot) on Mar 07, 2003 at 17:45 UTC
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I suppose that taking a strict view of the language, it should be 'PERL' since it's an acronym. OTOH, the Internet has historically taken a more liberal view of the English language (and I don't just mean l33t sp33k). Shouldn't 'eBay' be 'EBay'? How about putting lowercase in the middle of an acronym (such as 'HoA')?
Internet culture tends to allow a richer superset of the language than your High School English teacher does. You'll either accept this or you won't.
----
Reinvent a rounder wheel.
Note: All code is untested, unless otherwise stated
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From perlfaq1:
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. But never write "PERL", because perl isn't really an acronym, apocryphal folklore and post-facto expansions notwithstanding.
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I beg to differ on the "long after the language was named"
part, unless Larry named Perl long before releasing it in
the wild. The manual page released with the very first
version of Perl, version 1.0.0, says:
PERL(1) PERL(1)
NAME
perl - Practical Extraction and Report Language
Abigail | [reply]
[d/l] |
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It should be noted that expansion of 'perl' as an acronym was invented long after the language was named.
True enough, but its understandable that people think its the acronym (instead of a "backronym" or "retronym") when the first thing they see in "perldoc perl" is:
PERL(1) 2002-06-10 (perl v5.6.1) PERL(1)
NAME
perl - Practical Extraction and Report Language
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[d/l] |
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HoA is correct, because the o does not start a
"significant" word. (Your English teacher will tell
you that a word is "significant" for capitalisation
purposes unless it is an article, a coordinating
conjunction, or a short preposition. I forget
whether "short" in this context means <5 letters
or <=5 letters.) It is common for abbreviations
to capitalise only the words that start a significant
word: e.g., ComIntern, CoBOL[1].
We don't write PERL, of course, because computer
technical words are (usually) case-sensitive. This
is a special rule, but that's normal in English.
Nouns in the field of music follow a different
declension if they end in "o"; words and abbreviations
imported unchanged from Latin, unlike words imported
from all other languages, are typeset in italics,
except for mathematical terms imported from Latin
(e.g., QED),
which are not; et cetera, ad infinitum.
The case-sensitivity in computer words allows for
a significant amount of disambiguation: hence the
distinction between Perl and perl, the lack of any
confusion between BIND and activities with rope,
and so on. The rule is universal among people who
understand computer stuff in general, which is
an ever-growing percentage of the population, and
I am confident that it will become a permanent
special rule like the others listed. But yes, people
who don't know will continue to write "PERL", "Email",
"pianoes", "ect.", confuse e.g. with
i.e., and just generally write
like wankers.
- CoBOL does not follow hackish rules because
(like RPG) it is not a hacker language.
for(unpack("C*",'GGGG?GGGG?O__\?WccW?{GCw?Wcc{?Wcc~?Wcc{?~cc'
.'W?')){$j=$_-63;++$a;for$p(0..7){$h[$p][$a]=$j%2;$j/=2}}for$
p(0..7){for$a(1..45){$_=($h[$p-1][$a])?'#':' ';print}print$/}
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Re: Perl and Unix versus PERL and UNIX
by Jenda (Abbot) on Mar 11, 2003 at 19:48 UTC
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If they ask for PERL programmers it's fine. But I saw an add that requested experience with Pearl and Jawa. (FYI It was on a Czech job board and Jawa is a name of a Czech motorcycle company.)
Jenda
P.S.: Sometimes it's not the company to blame. Some personnel agencies think they have to contribute and "fix typos".
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