English(3pm) Perl Programmers Reference Guide English(3pm)
NAME
English - use nice English (or awk) names for ugly punctuation variables
SYNOPSIS
use English qw( -no_match_vars ) ; # Avoids regex performance penalty
use English;
...
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 for a complete list of these.
PERFORMANCE
This module can provoke sizeable inefficiencies for regular expressions, due to unfortunate implemen-tation implementation
tation 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 v5.8.8 2001-09-21 English(3pm)
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