English(3) Perl Programmers Reference Guide English(3) NAME English - use nice(1,2) English (or awk) names for ugly punctuation vari- ables SYNOPSIS use English qw( -no_match_vars ) ; # Avoids regex(3,7) performance penalty use English; ... if(3,n) ($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 trig- gered just by accessing them (like $0) will still be affected. For those variables that have an awk version(1,3,5), both long and short English alternatives are provided. For example, the $/ variable can be referred to either $RS or $INPUT_RECORD_SEPARATOR if(3,n) you are using the English module. See perlvar for a complete list of these. PERFORMANCE This module can provoke sizeable inefficiencies for regular expres- sions, due to unfortunate implementation details. If performance mat- ters in(1,8) 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(1,8) modules to avoid penalizing all applications which use them. perl v5.8.5 2001-09-21 English(3)