How to know when a variable is set

[Laura Creighton]

>Two decades later, well-known hacker Henry Spencer described the 
> Perl scripting language as a "Swiss-Army chainsaw", intending to 
> convey his evaluation of the language as exceedingly powerful but 
> ugly and noisy and prone to belch noxious fumes.   -- the jargon file

1.  It didn't take us 2 decades to start saying that about perl.
2.  You need one other definition here:
	Swiss-Army knife:	precisely the wrong tool for every job.
    The so-called Toronto Unix Mafia were describing things as
    swiss-army knives from before there _was_ a perl.  It's a
    _strong_ pejorative.  And I can't remember which of us coined 
    it -- probably Geoff Collyer, since Henry and Ian Darwin and I
    all believed in carrying Swiss Army knives, and owned them.