jest writes: "A few months back we had a discussion about the putative addition of «Perl» to the Oxford English Dictionary, and I said at the time that though it had been drafted, it was not then in. I am happy to be able to announce that now (specifically, as of Thursday) Perl is in the Oxford English Dictionary.
Potentially relevant info includes that the form «PERL» is regarded as "irregular" (dictionary-ese for "wrong"); that the first known example is from a Usenet posting on 13 May 1987; that the form «Perl» is used for the language itself, with «perl» used for the Perl interpreter; that Larry Wall looked over the draft entry; and that the name comes from the word «pearl» with the -a- dropped to differentiate it from another language called «PEARL», with the various acronymic expansions ("Practical Extraction and Report Language," etc.) being later rationalizations."
*duck*
Re:More on Perl and OED
vsergu on 2003-12-15T21:34:20
AKA jest above.
