MirBSD manpage: English(3p)

English(3p)     Perl Programmers Reference Guide      English(3p)

NAME

     English - use nice English (or awk) names for ugly punctua-
     tion 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 v5.8.8                2005-02-05                           1