EDIT: From their 2026 publication
>Permission to make digital or hard copies of portions of this work for personal use is granted; permission to make digital or hard copies of portions of this work for classroom use is also granted, but seems ill-advised
2024 (515 points, 125 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40197013
2021 (431 points, 165 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27929730
The remainder of the valid Perl programs are mostly valid due to a Perl
language feature that is not commonly present in most programming languages.
Namely, Perl has a feature called “unquoted strings”, in which a sequence
of alphanumeric characters by itself is parsed as though it were a quoted string.
As an example, Figure 5 is read by OCR as the text ME, which evaluates to the
string “ME” even though the ME isn’t quoted. This would result in a syntax
error in most other programming languages.
(To be fair to Perl, when perl is run with the -w flag to enable warnings, it does
helpfully inform the user that at some point in the future, the Perl developers
will most likely pick gggijgziifiiffif as a new reserved word:
Unquoted string "gggijgziifiiffif" may clash
with future reserved word at - line 1.)Quite some foresight indeed!