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A comment on If PHP Were British.

Re:If PHP Were British by premchai21 on Saturday August 20, 2011 @10:16AM (#2906670)
preg_match might actually be better expanded as practical_extraction_and_reporting_language_regular_expression_match. (I'd comment on the original but it's currently too overloaded for it, I gather.)
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Re:If PHP Were British by ojbyrne on Saturday August 20, 2011 @12:08PM (#2906921)
Actually, my understanding is that the p in preg actually stands for perl. php.net refers to PCRE (Perl Compatible Regular Expressions).
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Re:If PHP Were British by premchai21 on Saturday August 20, 2011 @12:26PM (#2906961)
Yes, and “Perl” has often been expanded as “Practical Extraction and Reporting Language” (I don't recall whether this is a half-joke or not, but I think it is).

If you like you can add the “compatible” though, which would conveniently add to the length.

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Re:If PHP Were British by tingletech on Saturday August 20, 2011 @12:54PM (#2907032)
$ perldoc perl

  NAME
       perl − Practical Extraction and Report Language
...
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Re:If PHP Were British by fferen on Saturday August 20, 2011 @10:19PM (#2908330)
From Wikipedia: "There is some contention about the all-caps spelling "PERL", which the documentation declares incorrect[28] and which some core community members consider a sign of outsiders.[29] The name is occasionally backronymed as Practical Extraction and Report Language, which appears at the top of the documentation[27] and in some printed literature.[30]"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl#Name

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Re:If PHP Were British by roel_v on Saturday August 20, 2011 @02:54PM (#2907379)
Yes, I'm quite sure that is the actual meaning. Back in the day there was 'ereg' as well, but that has been deprecated for a long time I think. IIRC, in 1998-1999 it was a commonly asked question when to use preg_ or ereg_ functions.

But I guess the php docs themselves have caused people to think that the p stands for 'perform' - from the php docs 'preg_match - Perform a regular expression match.'. So yeah.

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Re:If PHP Were British by rbanffy on Saturday August 20, 2011 @12:53PM (#2907027)
"pathologically_eclectic_rubbish_lister_regular_expression_match" would be my first choice.
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Re:If PHP Were British by justincormack on Saturday August 20, 2011 @10:22AM (#2906687)
Not overloaded, just form an orderly queue and wait please.
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Re:If PHP Were British by DaveChild on Sunday August 21, 2011 @05:48AM (#2908862)
I moved the site to Linode and set my swap incorrectly, so as soon as the memory ran out it fell over. Oops.
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Re:If PHP Were British by code_duck on Saturday August 20, 2011 @11:18AM (#2906804)
yeah, where does 'perform' come from?
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Re:If PHP Were British by Luyt on Saturday August 20, 2011 @11:46AM (#2906875)
COBOL. But I think the author didn't know that the preg_*() functions use regular expressions the same way Perl does.
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Re:If PHP Were British by DaveChild on Sunday August 21, 2011 @05:50AM (#2908867)
I did know that, but wasn't sure the "p" stood for "perl". The manual page for preg_match leads with "preg_match — Perform a regular expression match", so I went with that.
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Re:If PHP Were British by code_duck on Monday August 22, 2011 @04:16PM (#2913935)
True, and you never know with PHP.

The preg functions are wrappers around the Perl Compatible Regular Expressions library, though (PCRE) vs the older POSIX greg PHP functions, so I do think they mean Perl.

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