"Boss: You forgot to assign the result of your map! Hacker: Dang, I'm always forgetting my assignations... Boss: And what's that 'goto' doing there?!? Hacker: Er, I guess my finger slipped when I was typing 'getservbyport'... Boss: Ah well, accidents will happen. Maybe we should have picked APL."

": - cut in regexps I don't think we reached consensus on that. We're still backtracking..."

"Yes, we have consensus that we need 64 bit support."

"I suppose one could claim that an undocumented feature has no semantics. :-("

"I'm afraid my gut level reaction is basically, proceed is cute, but cute doesn't cut it in the emergency room."

"Beauty? What's that?"

"The way these things go, there are probably 6 or 8 kludgey ways to do it, and a better way that involves rethinking something that hasn't been rethunk yet."

"Think of prototypes as a funny markup language--the interpretation is left up to the rendering engine."

"For the sake of argument I'll ignore all your fighting words."

"People who understand context would be steamed to have someone else dictating how they can call it."

"Well, hey, let's just make everything into a closure, and then we'll have our general garbage collector, installed by 'use less memory'."

"The code also assumes that it's difficult to misspell 'a' or 'b'."

"Double *sigh*. _04 is going onto thousands of CDs even as we speak, so to speak."

"It's not really a rule--it's more like a trend."

"There's something to be said for returning the whole syntax tree."

"You don't have to wait--you can have it in 5.004_54 or so."

"Wow, I'm being shot at from both sides. That means I *must* be right."

"(To the extent that anyone but a Prolog programmer can understand \X totally. (And to the extent that a Prolog programmer can understand 'cut'.)"

"Not that I'm against sneaking some notions into people's heads upon occasion. (Or blasting them in outright.)"

"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."

"Just don't make the '9' format pack/unpack numbers..."

"Historically Tcl has always stored all intermediate results as strings. (With 8.0 they're rethinking that. Of course, Perl rethought that from the start.)"

"Tcl tends to get ported to weird places like routers."

"It's certainly easy to calculate the average attendance for Perl conferences."

"I don't think it's worth washing hogs over."

"If you remove stricture from a large Perl program currently, you're just installing delayed bugs, whereas with this feature, you're installing an instant bug that's easily fixed. Whoopee."

"Anyway, my money is still on use strict vars . . ."

"I surely do hope that's a syntax error."

"switch (ref $@) { OverflowError => warn 'Dam needs to be drained'; DomainError => warn 'King needs to be trained'; NuclearWarError => die; }"

"This has been planned for some time. I guess we'll just have to find someone with an exceptionally round tuit."

"I wasn't recommending that we make the links for them, only provide them with the tools to do so if they want to take the gamble (or the gambol)."

"And we can always supply them with a program that makes identical files into links to a single file."

"Magically turning people's old scalar contexts into list contexts is a recipe for several kinds of disaster."

"P.S. I suppose I really should be nicer to people today, considering I'll be singing in Billy Graham's choir tonight..."

"Oh, wait, that was Randal...nevermind..."

"But the possibility of abuse may be a good reason for leaving capabilities out of other computer languages, it's not a good reason for leaving capabilities out of Perl."

"I was about to say, 'Avoid fame like the plague,' but you know, they can cure the plague with penicillin these days."

"It's getting harder and harder to think out loud. One of these days someone's gonna go off and kill Thomas a'Becket for me..."