Many Perl coders are self-taught programmers with no CS background. If a man page calls something a regular expression, that is good enough for them.
Why drop to that level if you know better?
I don't want to appear "gratuitously ignorant" in front of someone who might be a decent computer scientist.
There are already ways in which I will appear ignorant due to actual ignorance; why go out of my way to dumb down the way I speak about something that I do understand?
If we are going to wreck math terminology why don't we just redefine "prime number". Let's see: 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, oh ... so 9 is prime 11, is prime, 13 is prime, 15 is prime ... And, what do you know: now we can use a regular regular regex for primality testing over the binary representation: why, it's just (0|1)*1. As a bonus, we can restore 1 to its proper status as a prime number and kick out the oddball 2.
Say, if Perl called an odd test function "isprime", would you start calling odd numbers prime?
