English(3p) Perl Programmers Reference Guide English(3p)NAMEEnglish - use nice English (or awk) names for ugly punctua-
tion 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 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 v5.8.8 2005-02-05 1
