Why is there so much “magic” in Perl?

Question

Looking through the perlsub and perlop manpages I\'ve noticed that there are many references to \"magic\" and \"magical\" there (just search any of them for \"magic\"). I wonder

Answer 1

When a Perl feature is described as "magic":

It means that that feature is implemented by NBA star Magic Johnson. Whenever Perl executes "magic", it is actually sending an RPC call to a remote receiver implanted in Magic himself. He computes the answer, and then sends a return message. The use of Mr. Johnson for all the hard parts of Perl provides a great abstraction layer and simplifies porting to new platforms. It's way easier than, say, the Apache Portable Runtime.

Source: perrin on Perl Monks

It's official! Perl is more magical.

Hits from the following Google searches:

 25  site:ruby-doc.org     magic
 36  site:docs.python.org  magic
497  site:perldoc.perl.org magic