man > English

English(3perl)                    Perl Programmers Reference Guide                    English(3perl)

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.

perl v5.38.2                                 2026-08-18                               English(3perl)