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English-Control-0.002
River stage zero No dependents
/ English::Control

NAME

English::Control - use names beginning with control for punctuation variables

VERSION

This document refers to version 0.002

SYNOPSIS

use English::Control;
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.

Unlike the English module, the aliases created by this module begin with a control character, and thus will be always found in package "main", in the area reserved by perl for its own use. They don't clutter the namespace used by your program's variables or by any other modules.

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 this module.

See perlvar for a complete list of these. Except for $MATCH, $PREMATCH, and $POSTMATCH, all the multi-character names are used.

Since control-character variables are forced to be in package main, nothing is imported into the caller's namespace, and the control-character aliases are made immediately upon compilation of this module. There is no difference between

use English::Control;

and

use English::Control ();

PERFORMANCE

This module does not touch the match variables that slow down older versions of perl. The aliases ${^PREMATCH}, ${MATCH}, and ${^POSTMATCH} are provided by perl itself in more recent versions.

BUGS AND LIMITATIONS

Unlike regular variables, variables that begin with control characters are exempt from the strictures imposed by use strict 'vars'. Mistyped variable names (e.g, "${^ERRRNO}" instead of "${ERRNO}") will not be flagged by the compiler. Thanks to Aristotle Pagaltzis for pointing this out.

Since these variables are in the space reserved by Perl for its own use, it may be that a future version of Perl will break this module by using some of these variable names for a different purpose.

AUTHOR

Aaron Priven <apriven@actransit.org>

BASED ON

English::Control is a pretty simple modification of English from the Perl 5 distribution, by Larry Wall et al.

COPYRIGHT & LICENSE

Copyright 2017

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of either:

  • the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 1, or (at your option) any later version, or

  • the Artistic License version 2.0.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.