Perl in the comics

I think by now we've all seen the comic from xkcd.com that gives Perl its proper respect and place in the history of the universe.

Some comics are a little less respectful, but I'll cut the guy some slack because he wrote a text adventure version of Pac-Man.

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4 Comments

RicMoo said:
I'd just like to point out, that it is completely valid Perl (providing you don't use strict) :o)
breno said:
  $ echo "@+-$^P&%"       > comic.pl
  $ echo "$#*@F%$$#!$#!" >> comic.pl
  $ perl -c comic.pl
  comic.pl syntax OK
Cool! =] (although it just doesn't do anything useful) There are a lot of other comics in which Perl shows up. Perl Foundation's Perl 5 wiki tried to gather all of them. They should add this one too!
Andy Lester Author Profile Page said:
That's not right, breno. The shell will try to expand $# as a shell variable, for example. Plus, ! is a special character in bash, and I can't execute the second line. If you do it in sh, though, look at what comic.pl shows you:
$ cat comic.pl
@+-$^P&%
0*@F%404#!0!
Not what you entered. You need single-quotes in your shell commands, just like if it was in Perl.
$ echo '@+-$^P&%'       > comic.pl
$ echo '$#*@F%$$#!$#!' >> comic.pl
$ cat comic.pl
@+-$^P&%
$#*@F%$$#!$#!
Now it at least matches. So let's see a deparsed version of that mess:
$ perl -MO=Deparse comic.pl
@+ - $^P & %${#} * @F % $$;
comic.pl syntax OK
A bit more readable, if not more useful.
Shlomi Fish Author Profile Page said:

We have a list of Perl-related cartoons on perl.net.au. I see we missed the 0x2121 one. I'll add it now, thanks!

That put aside, Perl has also been mentioned sometimes on Working Daze and Foxtrot, but these are commercial comics that eventually become inaccessible to non-paying surfers.

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This page contains a single entry by Andy Lester published on November 23, 2007 10:59 PM.

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