English(3)

NAME
English - use nice English (or awk) names for ugly punctuation variables

SYNOPSIS

    use English;
    ...
    if ($ERRNO =~ /denied/) { ... }

DESCRIPTION
You should not use this module in programs intended to be portable among Perl versions, programs that must perform regular expression matching operations efficiently, or libraries intended for use with such programs. In a sense, this module is deprecated. The reasons for this have to do with implementation details of the Perl interpreter which are too thorny to go into here. Perhaps someday they will be fixed to make "use English" more practical.

This module provides aliases for the built-in variables whose names no one seems to like to read. Variables with side-effects which get triggered just by accessing them (like $0) will still be affected.

For those variables that have an awk version, both long and short English alternatives are provided. For example, the $/ variable can be referred to either $RS or $INPUT_RECORD_SEPARATOR if you are using the English module.

See the perlvar manpage for a complete list of these.