<![CDATA[BOL: Perl Poem: Parse it in both Perl and English!]]> https://bioinformaticsonline.com/fun/view/2053/perl-poem-parse-it-in-both-perl-and-english? https://bioinformaticsonline.com/fun/view/2053/perl-poem-parse-it-in-both-perl-and-english Mon, 12 Aug 2013 19:00:55 -0500 https://bioinformaticsonline.com/fun/view/2053/perl-poem-parse-it-in-both-perl-and-english <![CDATA[Perl Poem: Parse it in both Perl and English!]]> Larry's, er, corpus has fortunately been overshadowed by that of the reigning Perl Poet, Sharon Hopkins. She has written quite a few Perl poems, as well as a paper on Perl poetry that she presented at the Usenix Winter 1992 Technical Conference, entitled "Camels and Needles: Computer Poetry Meets the Perl Programming Language". (The paper is available as misc/poetry.ps on CPAN.) Besides being the most prolific Perl poet, Sharon is also the most widely published, having had the following poem published in both the Economist and the Guardian:

#!/usr/bin/perl

APPEAL:

listen (please, please);

open yourself, wide;
join (you, me),
connect (us,together),

tell me.

do something if distressed;

@dawn, dance;
@evening, sing;
read (books,$poems,stories) until peaceful;
study if able;

write me if-you-please;

sort your feelings, reset goals, seek (friends, family, anyone);

do*not*die (like this)
if sin abounds;

keys (hidden), open (locks, doors), tell secrets;
do not, I-beg-you, close them, yet.

accept (yourself, changes),
bind (grief, despair);

require truth, goodness if-you-will, each moment;

select (always), length(of-days)

# listen (a perl poem)
# Sharon Hopkins
# rev. June 19, 1995

]]> Rahul Agarwal