I believe I was told it is a "Retronym" ;). It was named Pearl because Larry thought it sounded neat, changed it to Perl shortly after finding an existing language named Pearl. Then, later he came up with Practical Extraction and Report Language (interestingly, the "and" works with the orignal name :). I believe that was the stroy I was told :). | [reply] |
Yes, that's essentially what happened--except for the unfortunate fact that that's not what "retronym" means. Retronyms are things like "black and white TV", and "manual transmission", where the modifier merely tells you what "TV" and "transmission" used to mean all the time. Once you start looking for retronyms you find them all over the place: "dial telephone", "snail mail", "area rug", and pretty much "analog <anything>" these days. They're a lot of fun to think about.
Unfortunately, there's no decent word that I know of for an acronym definition made up after the acronym. I believe the OED says "later rationalizations" about Perl's glosses. I think "fakeronym" is cute, but it seems like we should really make up an acronym for it. We could call it a LATE, but I don't know what that stands for yet... :-)
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Oh :). Makes sense :). Thanks for clearing that up :).
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