Black Perl

Black Perl is an infamous 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 (to the apparent relief of Larry Wall, creator of the Perl programming language, as the Camel book claims). Multiple independent updates to make it parsable in Perl 5 have been published. The full text of the poem is reproduced below.

Attribution

While the poem itself is signed Larry Wall, the original message was posted with forged message headers. No authoritative attribution is known to this day. Sharon Rauenzahn nee Hopkins has been suspected, but has denied authorship. Randal Schwartz has claimed that Larry Wall is in fact the author.

"Black Perl"

BEFOREHAND: close door, each window & exit; wait until time.
    open spellbook, study, read (scan, select, tell us);
write it, print the hex while each watches,
    reverse its length, write again;
    kill spiders, pop them, chop, split, kill them.
        unlink arms, shift, wait & listen (listening, wait),
sort the flock (then, warn the "goats" & kill the "sheep");
    kill them, dump qualms, shift moralities,
    values aside, each one;
        die sheep! die to reverse the system
        you accept (reject, respect);
next step,
    kill the next sacrifice, each sacrifice,
    wait, redo ritual until "all the spirits are pleased";
    do it ("as they say").
do it(*everyone***must***participate***in***forbidden**s*e*x*).
return last victim; package body;
    exit crypt (time, times & "half a time") & close it,
    select (quickly) & warn your next victim;
AFTERWORDS: tell nobody.
    wait, wait until time;
    wait until next year, next decade;
        sleep, sleep, die yourself,
        die at last
# Larry Wall