"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..."

"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."

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

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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."

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

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

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

"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."

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

"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."

"Of course, this being Perl, we could always take both approaches."

"The following two statements are usually both true: There's not enough documentation. There's too much documentation."

"The computer should be doing the hard work. That's what it's paid to do, after all."

"Real theology is always rather shocking to people who already think they know what they think. I'm still shocked myself."

"Personally, I like to defiantly split my infinitives."

"Perl has a long tradition of working around compilers."

"Perhaps I'm missing the gene for making enemies."

"Anybody want a binary telemetry frame editor written in Perl?"

"We didn't put in ^^ because then we'd have to keep telling people what it means, and then we'd have to keep telling them why it doesn't short circuit. :-/"

"Any false value is gonna be fairly boring in Perl, mathematicians notwithstanding."

"True, it returns ' ' for false, but ' ' is an even more interesting number than 0."

"I'm sure a mathematician would claim that 0 and 1 are both very interesting numbers."

"I think you didn't get a reply because you used the terms 'correct' and 'proper', neither of which has much meaning in Perl culture."