http://qs321.pair.com?node_id=1200790


in reply to [OT] Slashdot is 20

As for CmdrTaco's career as a Perl Monk, well, he was not very prolific. :)

That said, note that The Rob Malda Rule: - though supposedly penned by the gods on Sep 08 1999 - was probably authored by CmdrTaco. Though CmdrTaco's home node says "Writeups: None", if you click on "None" you'll find another node authored by CmdrTaco namely Counting Substrings in Strings - curiously, his (two sentence) Perl question was asked on Oct 27 1999, two months before Perl Monks opened its doors to the public! His only known Perl Monks node suggests CmdrTaco was hardly a Perl expert back then, and he was duly counselled by chromatic and audreyt (who suggested using the goatse secret operator years before it was known by that unfortunate name :).

Full details on early Perl monks history can be found at: The First Ten Perl Monks

Update: His immortal two sentences uttered at the dawn of Perl Monks were:

Sentence one:

Whats a clean way to count the occurances of a substring withing a string?
I guess there was no feature to edit typos back then:
Whats -> What's
occurances -> occurrences
withing -> within

Sentence two:

I've been using $x++ while /foo/g; to count the occurances of 'foo' within $_, but it really seems like $x=/foo/g; ought to (in scaler context) return a count, but for some reason it always returns either undef or 1 (eg, a boolean).
A much longer sentence yet still only three typos:
occurances -> occurrences
scaler -> scalar
eg -> e.g.