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Re: Perl Co-inventor Convicted

On Thu, 27 Jul 1995 21:34:31 GMT, wsanders@netcom.com (Wiley Sanders) said:
> conviction of Randal Schwartz of Portland, Oregon. We all know Schwartz
> as one of the co-authors of the popular programming language "Perl",
> and co-author of [at least] one or two books on the subject.  Schwartz

The statement about Randal being a co-author of Perl is incorrect. Although
Randal was a co-author of some of the O'Reilly books about the languange, the
perl language itself is the product of Larry Wall. Perl was written in around
1986-7, when Larry, Mark Biggar (Larry's Brother in Law), and I were working
on the BLACKER program at System Development Corporation. Larry and I were
sharing an office at that time and Mark was next door; we all lived within 1
mile of each other and carpooled to work. BLACKER was a program to develop a
TCSEC A1 Multilevel Secure Wide Area Network. It involved software development
in Paoli PA and Santa Monica CA; the two sites were connected by a SLIP
line. Larry set up news between the two sites for local newsgroups. It was at
this time that Larry was tasked with developing a configuration management
system for the project. Being a good programmer (that is, lazy and impatient),
Larry decided that News would be the perfect problem reporting mechanism. He
modifed news to support syncronization of article numbers, and added the
ability to append to existing articles. He then had to produce configuration
management reports. The problem was that awk (at that time), couldn't easily
go trasping through the news article spool directories. So, Perl was born --
to produce CM reports. This is the reason d'etre for the FORMAT statement, and
why the name sometimes expands to "Pathelogically Eclectic Rubbish Lister"
(actually, Larry originally thought about naming it after his wife, Gloria. He
then decided to call it PEARL, because Gloria is a pearl of person, but then
found the name was in use. Thus PERL version 0 was born.).

Daniel
Perl's Paternal Godparent
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