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 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 v5.16.3 2013-03-04 English(3pm)