Perl in the comics

I'd just like to point out, that it is completely valid Perl (providing you don't use strict) :o)

  $ 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!

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.

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.