NAME¶
English - use nice English (or awk) names for ugly punctuation variables
SYNOPSIS¶
use English;
use English qw( -no_match_vars ) ; # Avoids regex performance
# penalty in perl 5.16 and
# earlier
...
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.
NOTE: This was fixed in perl 5.20. Mentioning these three variables no longer
makes a speed difference. This section still applies if your code is to run on
perl 5.18 or earlier.
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.