Perl programmer humour
Three examples of perl programmer humour I've seen in code and/or documentation. Read the comments for more examples.
At the end of a module we're all used to seeing the line:
1;
I just noticed that parent has the following instead:
"All your base are belong to us"
A reference to an internet meme, and parent is a lightweight replacement for the base pragma.
Another module which made me smile: the SEE ALSO section for Chart::Strip says
Yellowstone National Park
And the documentation for Class::Singleton has example objects called $highlander and $macleod, leading to the line "There can be only one", which is taken from the film Highlander.
What others have you seen?
Perl hacker since 1992.
Try Acme::ReturnValue and check and old set of results.
This should be part of Meta::CPAN!
Ha! I came late to the party...
I'll often end my modules with
__PACKAGE__or__FILE__. I occasionally end them with something more amusing... e.g. Sub::Lazy.Sub::Exporter's magic true value is "jn8:32" which is a reference to a verse about truth from the Bible: "Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free."
Nearly every module I've written in the past couple of years (both public and private) ends with a statement of the form,
1 && q{this statement is true};, where the stuff in the quotes is usually something random.For example, at the end of
Set::CartesianProduct::Lazyis the line,1 && q{a set in time saves nine};.Date::Extract::Surprisehasq{life without coffee isn't worth living}and another module ends withq{this is a terrible kludge}I don't remember exactly why I use the
1 && ..., but it was either to suppress a warning I would get when using just a bare string there, or perhaps it was to satisfy aPerl::Criticpolicy, or maybe it was to satisfy a co-worker who felt the purpose of the bare string was confusing...Looking through some of those, I really like the ones that are the "what I'm currently listening to". Seems like a nice hidden time capsule for many years from now. I might start doing that too or something like it.
Hm, the last run of Acme::ReturnValue was more than two years ago. Maybe I should run it again (and/or improve Acme::ReturnValue)...
And regarding the return value "favourite record of the moment", for some reasons I don't remember right now I stopped doing that some time ago. But it was in fact funny and has indeed a time capsule effect when I re-open some old file a few years later.
I usually end with 0x55AA;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_boot_record#Sector_layout
https://metacpan.org/source/RJBS/Games-Nintendo-Mario-0.204/lib/Games/Nintendo/Mario.pm
Really cracked me up when i first saw it.
In Test::Database, all database "drivers" end with the name of the DBD driver. Not really funny, though.
Heh, I've just seen this at the end of relative:
"evitaler fo dnE" # "End of relative"