phpMan > man > English(3pm)

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

SYNOPSIS
        use English;
        use English qw( -no_match_vars ) ;  # Avoids regex performance
                                            # penalty in perl 5.18 and
                                            # earlier
        ...
        if ($ERRNO =~ /denied/) { ... }

DESCRIPTION
    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 perlvar for a complete list of these.

PERFORMANCE
    NOTE: This was fixed in perl 5.20. Mentioning these three variables no longer makes a speed
    difference. This section still applies if your code is to run on perl 5.18 or earlier.

    This module can provoke sizeable inefficiencies for regular expressions, due to unfortunate
    implementation details. If performance matters in your application and you don't need $PREMATCH,
    $MATCH, or $POSTMATCH, try doing

       use English qw( -no_match_vars ) ;

    . It is especially important to do this in modules to avoid penalizing all applications which
    use them.