"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.'"

"One operator is no big deal. That can be fixed in a jiffy."

"So I'm thinking about ??, or !!, or //, or \\, or whatever. But I think I like ?? the best so far. Or the least worst."

"If this were Ada, we'd simply doc it as 'erroneous'."

"That which hits the fan tends to get flung in all directions."

"Psychotics are consistently inconsistent. The essence of sanity is to be inconsistently inconsistent."

"On the plus side, it's a lot easier in general to find /usr/include than cpp."

"Perl did not get where it is by ignoring psychological factors."

"I dunno. Perhaps you should be happy that I have a policy of refraining from grumbling about handicapped operating systems."

"Well, sure, I explicitly mentioned 'vtables' last time I brought this up. But a single pointer is fairly paltry, as tables go."

": What do people think? What, do people think?"

"It's, uh, pseudo code. Yeah, that's the ticket... [...] And 'unicode' is pseudo code for $encoding."

"So please don't think I have a 'down' on the MVS people. I'm just pulling off their arms to beat other people over the head with."

"I view the JVM as just another architecture that Perl ought to be ported to. (That, and the Underwood typewriter...)"

"I note that the Python folks still think they like JPython. I wonder how long that will last?"

"The court finds everyone to be in contempt (including himself :-), and orders everyone sentenced to five years hard labor. (Working on Perl, of course.)"

"And besides, if Perl really takes off in the Windows space, I think the rest of us would just as soon have a double-agent within ActiveState."

"Maybe we should take a clue from FTP and put in an option like 'print hash marks on every 1024 iterations'."

": Why Bible quotes exclusively? What happened to the Eastern religions?<BR> I'm still working on the Unicode mods."

"Perhaps you should compile your Perl with long doubles one of these megaseconds."

"The way I see it, if you declare something portable, you'll always be wrong, and if you declare it non-portable, you'll always be right."

"I'd make people say 'use Fork;' if I thought I could get away with it."

"I've always maintained a cordial dislike for indent, because it's usually right."

"I don't believe I've ever cuddled my elses."

"There's often more than one correct thing. There's often more than one right thing. There's often more than one obvious thing."

": I could understand principles of Perl source in 2-3 days [. . .] Gee, it took me about eleven years."

"print rand rand rand 1, '\n'; # interesting distribution"

"Y'know, there are other possibilities if we assume that filenames are UTF-8...yikes...wait, put down that meat cleaver! Aieeee!!!"

"I'm reminded of the day my daughter came in, looked over my shoulder at some Perl 4 code, and said, 'What is that, swearing?"

"Just put in another goto, and then it'll be readable."

"I would estimate that the number of programs it breaks in the world will be less than 10. As long as one of those 10 isn't CGI.pm, we're probably okay."

"Perl should remain fast and intuitive (to the extent that it is :-)"

"That's a valid argument. I just don't think it's valid enough."

"Even the White House has a press agent."

"Well, you know, Hubbard had a bunch of people sworn to commit suicide when he died. So of course he never officially died..."

"I was trying not to mention backtracking. Which, of course, means that yours is 'righter' than mine, in a theoretical sense."

"'Course, that doesn't work when 'a' contains parentheses."

"That gets us out of deciding how to spell Reg[eE]xp?|RE . . . Of course, then we have to decide what ref $re returns..."

"That should probably be written: no !@#$%^&*:@!semicolon"

"The Harvard Law states: Under controlled conditions of light, temperature, humidity, and nutrition, the organism will do as it damn well pleases."

"As pointed out in a followup, Real Perl Programmers prefer things to be visually distinct."

"It may be possible to get this condition from within Perl if a signal handler runs at just the wrong moment. Another point for Chip..."

"Well, you can implement a Perl peek() with unpack('P',..). Once you have that, there's only security through obscurity."

"To ordinary folks, conversion is not always automatic. It's something that may or may not require explicit assistance. See Billy Graham."

"I think that's easier to read. Pardon me. Less difficult to read."