English

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



NAME
       English - 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
       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 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 penaliz-
       ing all applications which use them.



perl v5.8.8			  2001-09-21			   English(3)