I was just in Asia teaching classes in Japan and Hong Kong, and I had to explain the 'croak' function. There was a sea of puzzled faces and then someone asked why it was called 'croak'. I realized that 'croak' is colloquial English, almost slang, and people who speak English as a second or third language are likely to know it only as the noise a frog makes, and not understand the connection with 'die'.

So I put my hands around my neck and croaked, and they got it.

So now tell me how you'd mime "carp" to them (btw, carp is the funniest perl function ;-)

Simply say that "to carp" is colloquial for "to nag, to bother, to warn, to complain." They'll get it.

It's not like other languages don't have double meanings and puns and homonyms too. For example, there is a kanji in Japanese for the word "woman." There is another kanji which is simply three copies of "woman" crammed into one character, which means "noisy" or "immoral." Go ahead, tell me that there's no ancient cultural significance to that linguistic choice.

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[ e d @ h a l l e y . c c ]

fishiest, anyway!

carp is the least "sexy" perl function for people who are not native (or assimilated) english speakers. It's kind of weird but I need to understand the "verb" to use it (and periodically I look at the meaning of carp in some online dictionnary). Result: yes I croak sometimes, but do not carp...

that could be a pool question, no? what is the most unused perl function? and that will be carp ;)

cheers --steph (who has lived for 7 years in Ann Arbor, MI and one year in Southampton, England) a carp is a silent fish...what kind of mnemonics is that for LOUD error printing, I wonder...

Start making your mouth go all rounded, like a fish mouth, while making "blah, blah, blah" noises...

Shutdown. You can confuse it with reboot (both are syscalls, but reboot is not a perl function, as it is highly system-dependent).

but that's the fault of the socket API isn't? but yes poorly chosen "verbs" should have at least decent aliases...like carp -> shout ;)

Nice story:-)

I never thought about it that way. I'm not a native English speaker, but I never bother to find out how it translates into my language. I just naturally see it, as the way I imagine it, croaking means spraying some curses before it dies considering the lines it throws. It's been one of my fave functions ever since I knew it and use it all the time for big programs despite hurting my eyes by looking at the error log when something goes bad.

I'd have to go with fork. I once wrote an application which involved a forking Soap server... I could hardly say the words "forking Soap server" without giggling uncontrollably.

Hehe yeah I had a similar experience. I had an OS professor with a pretty bad french accent who was trying to explain forking a process: "When you want to have children, you have to fork" And he couldn't understand why we would laugh everytime he explained it, so he repeated it often. :)

Reminds me of my probability & statistics prof in college. He'd explain some problem about coin flipping, and then ask loudly in his middle easrern accent: "So what is the probability of getting head?"

and of course we'd laugh & laugh - a least the 4 of us that got the joke. (not that the prof ever understood why we were laughing)

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I use the most powerful debugger available: print!