English(3) Perl Programmers Reference Guide English(3) NNNNAAAAMMMMEEEE English - use nice English (or awk) names for ugly punctuation variables SSSSYYYYNNNNOOOOPPPPSSSSIIIISSSS use English; ... if ($ERRNO =~ /denied/) { ... } DDDDEEEESSSSCCCCRRRRIIIIPPPPTTTTIIIIOOOONNNN You should _n_o_t use this module in programs intended to be portable among Perl versions, programs that must perform regular expression matching operations efficiently, or libraries intended for use with such programs. In a sense, this module is deprecated. The reasons for this have to do with implementation details of the Perl interpreter which are too thorny to go into here. Perhaps someday they will be fixed to make "use English" more practical. 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 aaaawwwwkkkk 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 the _p_e_r_l_v_a_r manpage for a complete list of these. 12/Jul/1999 perl 5.005, patch 03 1