"Even if you aren't in doubt, consider the mental welfare of the person who has to maintain the code after you, and who will probably put parens in the wrong place."

"Does the same as the system call of that name. If you don't know what it does, don't worry about it."

"Be consistent."

"/* This bit of chicanery makes a unary function followed by a parenthesis into a function with one argument, highest precedence. */"

"#else /* !STDSTDIO */ /* The big, slow, and stupid way */"

"/* dbmrefcnt--; */ /* doesn't work, rats */"

"if (instr(buf,sys_errlist[errno])) /* you don't see this */"

"signal(i, SIG_DFL); /* crunch, crunch, crunch */"

"s = (char*)(long)retval; /* ouch */"

"/* we have tried to make this normal case as abnormal as possible */"

"Your csh still thinks true is false. Write to your vendor today and tell them that next year Configure ought to 'rm /bin/csh' unless they fix their blasted shell."

"You can't have filenames longer than 14 chars. You can't even think about them!"

"There is, however, a strange, musty smell in the air that reminds me of something...hmm...yes...I've got it...there's a VMS nearby, or I'm a Blit."

"That means I'll have to use $ans to suppress newlines now. Life is ridiculous."

"OOPS! You naughty creature! You didn't run Configure with sh! I will attempt to remedy the situation by running sh for you..."

"[End of diatribe. We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming...]"

"echo 'Your stdio isn't very std.'"

"echo $package has manual pages available in source form. echo 'However, you don't have nroff, so they're probably useless to you."

"echo 'ICK, NOTHING WORKED!!! You may have to diddle the includes.';;"

"echo 'Hmmm...you don't have Berkeley networking in libc.a...' echo 'but the Wollongong group seems to have hacked it in."

"echo 'Congratulations. You aren't running Eunice."

"str->str_pok |= SP_FBM; /* deep magic */ s = (unsigned char*)(str->str_ptr); /* deeper magic */"

"pos += screamnext[pos] /* does this goof up anywhere? */"

"tmps_base = tmps_max; /* protect our mortal string */"

"stab_val(stab)->str_nok = 1; /* what a wonderful hack! */"

"break; /* don't do magic till later */"

"/* And you'll never guess what the dog had */ /* in its mouth... */"

"if (rsfp = mypopen('/bin/mail root','w')) { /* heh, heh */"

"#define SIGILL 6 /* blech */"

"#define NULL 0 /* silly thing is, we don't even use this */"

"/* now make a new head in the exact same spot */"

"double value; /* or your money back! */ short changed; /* so triple your money back! */"

"I think I'm happier with that. $rubyometer += 0.3 or so."

"And in the limiting case where the optimizer is completely broken because it's not implemented yet, we get to work around that too. Optionally..."

"I try not to confuse roles and traits in my own life. Being the Perl god is a role. Being a stubborn cuss is a trait."

"Accidental stacks considered harmful."

"We don't have enough parallel universes to allow all uses of all junction types--in the absence of quantum computing the combinatorics are not in our favor..."

": No comment, since this is still hovering (see Larry's reply). Flutter, flutter."

"One thing I do understand is that people get scared when I start thinking out loud."

"It should be illegal to yell 'Y2K' in a crowded economy."

"The Golden Gate wasn't our fault either, but we still put a bridge across it."

"That being said, I think we should immediately deprecate any string concatenation that combines '19' with '99'."

"That is a known bug in 5.00550. Either an upgrade or a downgrade will fix it."

"Symmetry is overrated. Overrated is symmetry."

"Must be a different Larry Wall. There are at least 137 of us in the U.S."

"Orthogonality for orthogonality's sake is not something I'm keen on."

"My arthritic pinkies are already starting to ache just thinking about ||||=."

"But I know what's important to me, and what isn't. And I think I know what people can get used to, and what they can even learn to like. (It just takes some people longer than others. :-)"

"Would you trust the linguistic intuitions of someone who has been studying Latin or Greek for three days?"

"In Clintonese, that would be 'You are free to infer that I was saying that.'"