Programming Perl, 4th Edition

Perl Poetry

Perl assumes that any bareword it runs into will eventually be the name of a defined subroutine, even if you haven’t defined it yet. This is sometimes called “Perl poetry mode”. This allows people to write poetry in Perl, such as this monstrosity:

BEFOREHAND: close door, each window & exit; wait until time.
    open spellbook, study, read (scan, select, tell us);
write it, print the hex while each watches,
    reverse its length, write again;
    kill spiders, pop them, chop, split, kill them.
        unlink arms, shift, wait & listen (listening, wait),
sort the flock (then, warn the "goats" & kill the "sheep");
    kill them, dump qualms, shift moralities,
    values aside, each one;
        die sheep! die to reverse the system
        you accept (reject, respect);
next step,
    kill the next sacrifice, each sacrifice,
    wait, redo ritual until "all the spirits are pleased";
    do it ("as they say").
do it(*everyone***must***participate***in***forbidden**s*e*x*).
return last victim; package body;
    exit crypt (time, times & "half a time") & close it,
    select (quickly) & warn your next victim;
AFTERWORDS: tell nobody.
    wait, wait until time;
    wait until next year, next decade;
        sleep, sleep, die yourself,
        die at last

Larry wrote this poem and sent it to news.groups to support his request for the creation of a comp.lang.perl.poems group. Most people probably noticed that it was April 1, but that didn’t deter people from writing more Perl poetry.

Sharon Hopkins wrote quite a few Perl poems, as well as a paper on Perl poetry that ...