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in reply to Re^3: Ways of quoting
in thread Ways of quoting

... and commonly referred to as the baby cart.

(As a speaker of en_GB that's not a term in our common usage. You are more likely to hear "buggy" or "pram". IMHO this makes the "baby cart" term even more preferable since it has a unique meaning for me - it's only the perl operator, regardless of context.)

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Re^5: Ways of quoting
by tobyink (Canon) on May 17, 2020 at 06:44 UTC

    Yeah, I've never heard the term "baby cart" outside the context of Perl. (I grew up in Australia and live in the UK.)

    toby döt ink
[reply]

      Yes, it's quite the mystery! "Baby carriage" maybe ... but "baby cart" ... never!

      I'd always assumed it was a literal translation from an uninformed non-native English speaker. For this explanation to be plausible though, we need to find a language (or country) in which "baby cart" is the idiomatic way to say "pram" - anyone know one?

      Searching urban dictionary suggests it might have been chosen for its lewd connotations - which is consistent with the infamous goatse secret operator. I think it's time to ask the BooK.

[reply]

        Indeed, I chose the name "Baby cart". :-)

        I knew about this name because a decade or two earlier (1987!), Lone Wolf and Cub had been published in comic-book form in the US, and I had read about it in a French fanzine (older than Perl, and still published!).

        A few years later, I saw one one of the Baby Cart movies (most likely Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart to Hades) in a small theater in my home town.

        These were my influences in picking the name.

        For the historians among us, I just found the thread in fwp where I proposed the "baby cart" name (a year and a halt after the original thread).

        Regarding the Urban Dictionary reference, I had no idea about that meaning of the term. Although this comment in the original "Secret Operators" thread might hint at some other lewd reference. (I have no memory of what the "name we found" was).

        I listed the alternatives in the perlsecret manual page following the discussion in that thread, which made it clear it wasn't a very common term.
[reply]

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