Larry Wall

"The random quantum fluctuations of my brain are historical accidents that happen to have decided that the concepts of dynamic scoping and lexical scoping are orthogonal and should remain that way."

"At many levels, Perl is a 'diagonal' language."

"I'm serious about thinking through all the possibilities before we settle on anything. All things have the advantages of their disadvantages, and vice versa."

"Part of language design is perturbing the proposed feature in various directions to see how it might generalize in the future."

"Sometimes we choose the generalization. Sometimes we don't."

"I wouldn't ever write the full sentence myself, but then, I never use goto either."

"It's appositival, if it's there. And it doesn't have to be there. And it's really obvious that it's there when it's there."

"Oh, get ahold of yourself. Nobody's proposing that we parse English."

"As with all the other proposals, it's basically just a list of words. You can deal with that..."

"I hope I'm not getting so famous that I can't think out load [sic] anymore."

"It would be possible to optimize some forms of goto, but I haven't bothered."

"A 'goto' in Perl falls into the category of hard things that should be possible, not easy things that should be easy."

"How do Crays and Alphas handle the POSIX problem?"

"Well, that's more-or-less what I was saying, though obviously addition is a little more cosmic than the bitwise operators."

"You tell it that it's indicative by appending $!. That's why we made $! such a short variable name, after all."

"The choice of approaches could be made the responsibility of the programmer."

"As someone pointed out, you could have an attribute that says 'optimize the heck out of this routine', and your definition of heck would be a parameter to the optimizer."

"If you're going to define a shortcut, then make it the base [sic] darn shortcut you can."

"It is my job in life to travel all roads, so that some may take the road less travelled, and others the road more travelled, and all have a pleasant day."

"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..."

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

"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."

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

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

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

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

"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)."

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

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

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

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

"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."

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

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

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

"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.)"

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

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

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

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

"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..."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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. :-)"