English(3p) Perl Programmers Reference Guide English(3p)
English - use nice English (or awk) names for ugly punctua- tion variables
use English qw( -no_match_vars ) ; # Avoids regex performance penalty use English; ... if ($ERRNO =~ /denied/) { ... }
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.
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 v5.8.8 2005-02-05 1