Perl Is Not An Acronym

Some will say, after glancing at man perl(1), that Perl is an acronym for either:

• Practical Extraction and Report Language, or
• Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister

Those who have read the CamelBook or the PerlFaq will know that such expansions are not real. PerlLanguage is Perl. There is no PERL. The expansions are just frivolous.

To quote the PerlFaq:

What's the difference between "perl" and "Perl"?

One bit. Oh, you weren't talking ASCII? :-) Larry now uses "Perl" to signify the language proper and "perl" the implementation of it, i.e. the current interpreter. Hence Tom's quip that "Nothing but perl can parse Perl." You may or may not choose to follow this usage. For example, parallelism means "awk and perl" and "Python and Perl" look OK, while "awk and Perl" and "Python and perl" do not. But never write "PERL", because perl is not an acronym, apocryphal folklore and post-facto expansions notwithstanding.

To quote the OED:

Coined by Larry Wall in early 1987; the program was publicly released on 18 December of that year. Explanations of the name as an acronym (e.g. < the initial letters of Practical Extraction and Report Language, < the initial letters of Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister), although found early in the documentation for the language, are subsequent rationalizations.]