legal Perl code, for example the piece known as Black Perl. Perl poetry is made possible by the large number of English words that are used in the Perl language. New poems are regularly submitted to the community at PerlMonks. Perl on IRC A number of IRC channels offer support for Perl and some of its modules. CPAN Acme There are also many examples of code written purely for entertainment on the CPAN. Lingua::Romana::Perligata, for example, allows writing programs in Latin. Upon execution of such a program, the module translates its source code into regular Perl and runs it. The Perl community has set aside the "Acme" namespace for modules that are fun in nature (but its scope has widened to include exploratory or experimental code or any other module that is not meant to ever be used in production). Some of the Acme modules are deliberately implemented in amusing ways. This includes Acme::Bleach, one of the first modules in the Acme:: namespace, which allows the program's source code to be "whitened" (i.e., all characters replaced with whitespace) and yet still work. Example code In older versions of Perl, one would write the Hello World program as: print "Hello, World!\n"; Here is a more complex Perl program, that counts down seconds from a given starting value: #!/usr/bin/perl use strict; use warnings; my ( $remaining, $total ); $remaining = $total = shift(@ARGV); STDOUT->autoflush(1); while ( $remaining ) { printf ( "Remaining %s/%s \r", $remaining--, $total ); sleep 1; } print "\n"; The Perl interpreter can also be used for one-off scripts on the command line. The following example (as invoked from an sh-compatible shell, such as Bash) translates the string "Bob" in all files ending with .txt in the current directory to "Robert": $ perl -i.bak -lp -e 's/Bob/Robert/g' *.txt Criticism Perl has been referred to as "line noise" and a write-only language by its critics. The earliest such mention was in the first edition of the book Learning Perl, a Perl 4 tutorial book written by Randal L. Schwartz, in the first chapter of which he states: "Yes, sometimes Perl looks like line noise to the uninitiated, but to the seasoned Perl programmer, it looks like checksummed line noise with a mission in life." He also stated that the accusation that Perl is a write-only language could be avoided by coding with "proper care". The Perl overview document states that