English(3pm) Perl Programmers Reference Guide English(3pm)
NAME
English - use nice English (or awk) names for ugly punctuation
variables
SYNOPSIS
use English;
use English qw( -no_match_vars ) ; # Avoids regex performance
# penalty in perl 5.18 and
# earlier
...
if ($ERRNO =~ /denied/) { ... }
DESCRIPTION
This module provides aliases for the built-in variables whose names no
one seems to like to read. Variables with side-effects which get
triggered just by accessing them (like $0) will still be affected.
For those variables that have an awk version, both long and short
English alternatives are provided. For example, the $/ variable can be
referred to either $RS or $INPUT_RECORD_SEPARATOR if you are using the
English module.
See perlvar(1) for a complete list of these.
PERFORMANCE
NOTE: This was fixed in perl 5.20. Mentioning these three variables no
longer makes a speed difference. This section still applies if your
code is to run on perl 5.18 or earlier.
This module can provoke sizeable inefficiencies for regular
expressions, due to unfortunate implementation details. If performance
matters in your application and you don't need $PREMATCH, $MATCH, or
$POSTMATCH, try doing
use English qw( -no_match_vars ) ;
. It is especially important to do this in modules to avoid penalizing
all applications which use them.
perl v5.38.2 2023-11-28 English(3pm)
perl 5.38.2 - Generated Thu Dec 5 13:38:29 CST 2024