Re: Digest::MD4

From: Zsdc (zsdc_at_wp.pl)
Date: 03/01/04 

Date: Mon, 01 Mar 2004 17:56:30 +0100
To: "R. Joseph Newton" <rjnewton@efn.org>

R. Joseph Newton wrote:
> zsdc wrote:
>
>>John W. Krahn wrote:
>>>
>>>Perl and Unix are not acronyms or abbreviations although LDAP is.
>>
>>Actually, Perl is an acronym of Practical Extraction and Report
>>Language.
>
> Close, not quite. Larry has a rather perverse sense of humor, and as a
> concession to the indiscriminate acronymophilia of the day, he allowed as to how
> the acronym you listed could be applied, just as could be P[adjective I have
> forgotten] Eclectic Rubbish Lister

You mean Pathological Eclectic Rubbish Lister, which of course is a
joke, but the earliest acronym expantion is Practical Extraction and
Report Language. (The first name was PEARL, but as it turned out there
already was a language called like that.)

This is perl 1.0 manpage from 1987:

NAME
perl | Practical Extraction and Report Language

SYNOPSIS
perl [options] filename args

DESCRIPTION
Perl is a interpreted language optimized for scanning arbi-
trary text files, extracting information from those text
files, and printing reports based on that information. It's
also a good language for many system management tasks. The
language is intended to be practical (easy to use, effi-
cient, complete) rather than beautiful (tiny, elegant,
minimal). It combines (in the author's opinion, anyway)
some of the best features of C, sed, awk, and sh, so people
familiar with those languages should have little difficulty
with it. (Language historians will also note some vestiges
of csh, Pascal, and even BASIC|PLUS.) Expression syntax
corresponds quite closely to C expression syntax. If you
have a problem that would ordinarily use sed or awk or sh,
but it exceeds their capabilities or must run a little fas-
ter, and you don't want to write the silly thing in C, then
perl may be for you. There are also translators to turn
your sed and awk scripts into perl scripts. OK, enough
hype. 

-- 
ZSDC

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