T
Tad J McClellan
Gordon Etly said:David said:David Formosa (aka ? the Platypus) wrote: [...]
So emacs is an acronym for Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping.
No, the man page for "emacs" defines it as "emacs - GNU project
Emacs", while for perl (either via man or perldoc) defines it as
"perl - Practical Extraction and Report Language".
But neather of those are definitions, there abstracts.
That may be, and perhaps definition was too strong a wording to describe
it, but it's still written as providing some sort of meaning for each
letter in Perl, in Perl's own documentation.
Giving a meaning for each letter results in an acronym, and using all
caps or all lowercase to describe an acronym that has no explicit mixed
case should be fair game, should it not?
There for
That was unfortunate...
the FAQ that says not to use "PERL" should be corrected imho,
It could be corrected from:
But never write "PERL", because perl is not an acronym,
apocryphal folklore and post-facto expansions notwithstanding.
to something like:
But never write "PERL", because perl is not an acronym,
and you will look silly if you spell it like that.
as it is perfectly reasonable to use it as "perl" or "PERL" when
referring to it as an acronym.
Whether it is right or wrong, documented or not does not matter
much with regard to whether to write "PERL" or not.
Why do people apply a stigma to those who use it?
From their *observed experience*.
There is a strong correlation between spelling it that way and
being a post that I would rather skip reading.
Q: Is that right?
A: Doesn't matter, because the heuristic *works* whether right or wrong.
So, how can we make it OK to spell it PERL?
Simply change the observed experience so that it is no longer effective.
ie. impart clue by pointing out that it is not spelled "PERL".
When "PERL" and "I want to skip this one" are no longer related,
then people will stop depending on the information that those
rules of thumb currently provide to us.