Editing Schwartzian transform (section)

==History==

The first known online appearance of the Schwartzian transform is a December 16, 1994 [http://groups.google.com/group/comp.unix.shell/browse_frm/thread/31da970cebb30c6d?hl=en posting by Randal Schwartz] to a thread in comp.unix.shell [[Usenet newsgroup]], crossposted to comp.lang.perl. (The current version of the [http://history.perl.org/PerlTimeline.html Perl Timeline] is incorrect and refers to a later date in 1995.) The thread began with a question about how to sort a list of lines by their "last" word:

 adjn:Joshua Ng
 adktk:KaLap Timothy Kwong
 admg:Mahalingam Gobieramanan
 admln:Martha L. Nangalama

Schwartz responded with:

<syntaxhighlight lang="perl">
#!/usr/bin/env perl
require 5; # New features, new bugs!
print
    map { $_->[0] }
    sort { $a->[1] cmp $b->[1] }
    map { [$_, /(\S+)$/] }
    <>; 
</syntaxhighlight>

This code produces the result:

 admg:Mahalingam Gobieramanan
 adktk:KaLap Timothy Kwong
 admln:Martha L. Nangalama
 adjn:Joshua Ng

Schwartz noted in the post that he was "Speak[ing] with a lisp in Perl", a reference to the idiom's [[Lisp (programming language)|Lisp]] origins.

The term "Schwartzian transform" itself was coined by [[Tom Christiansen]] in a follow-up reply. Later posts by Christiansen made it clear that he had not intended to ''name'' the construct, but merely to refer to it from the original post: his attempt to finally name it "The Black Transform" did not take hold ("Black" here being a pun on "schwar[t]z", which means black in German).