1English(3pm)           Perl Programmers Reference Guide           English(3pm)
2
3
4

NAME

6       English - use nice English (or awk) names for ugly punctuation
7       variables
8

SYNOPSIS

10           use English;
11           use English qw( -no_match_vars ) ;  # Avoids regex performance
12                                               # penalty in perl 5.18 and
13                                               # earlier
14           ...
15           if ($ERRNO =~ /denied/) { ... }
16

DESCRIPTION

18       This module provides aliases for the built-in variables whose names no
19       one seems to like to read.  Variables with side-effects which get
20       triggered just by accessing them (like $0) will still be affected.
21
22       For those variables that have an awk version, both long and short
23       English alternatives are provided.  For example, the $/ variable can be
24       referred to either $RS or $INPUT_RECORD_SEPARATOR if you are using the
25       English module.
26
27       See perlvar for a complete list of these.
28

PERFORMANCE

30       NOTE: This was fixed in perl 5.20.  Mentioning these three variables no
31       longer makes a speed difference.  This section still applies if your
32       code is to run on perl 5.18 or earlier.
33
34       This module can provoke sizeable inefficiencies for regular
35       expressions, due to unfortunate implementation details.  If performance
36       matters in your application and you don't need $PREMATCH, $MATCH, or
37       $POSTMATCH, try doing
38
39          use English qw( -no_match_vars ) ;
40
41       .  It is especially important to do this in modules to avoid penalizing
42       all applications which use them.
43
44
45
46perl v5.36.3                      2023-11-30                      English(3pm)