Black Perl is a famous piece of Perl poetry. It was posted to Usenet on April 1, 1990. It is written in Perl 3 and will not parse under Perl 5. Multiple independent updates to Black Perl to make it parsable in Perl 5 have been published. The full text of the poem is reproduced below.
Contents
Attribution
While the poem itself is signed Larry Wall, the original message was posted with forged message headers, causing uncertainty of authorship. Sharon Rauenzahn, born Hopkins, has been suspected, but has denied authorship. Randal Schwartz has claimed that Larry Wall is in fact the author, and later on Larry Wall confirmed that claim.
Result of program execution
When executed, Black Perl exits on line one, upon reaching the function exit. The remaining lines are parsed by the Perl interpreter but never actually executed. The program produces no output.