English(3) Perl Programmers Reference Guide English(3)NAMEEnglish - use nice English (or awk) names for ugly punctuation vari‐
ables
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 trig‐
gered just by accessing them (like $0) will still be affected.
For those variables that have an awk version, both long and short Eng‐
lish 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 expres‐
sions, due to unfortunate implementation details. If performance mat‐
ters 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 2004-05-07 English(3)