Wow, I never knew Ruby's predefined global variables were so cryptically named. (Not a ruby developer)

Is there any sane reason it was designed this way (the language I mean, not this fix)

http://perldoc.perl.org/English.html perl has it too. So, you can still write ruby like perl

I imagine this works about as well as it does in Perl. Not everybody uses it, so you have to know the short-hand variables anyway, but now you've got an entire new set of magic names to learn! Let's all learn two names for everything!

This should be a part of the Ruby distribution.

Asking people to stop stop writing Ruby like Perl is like asking people to stop writing C++ like C.

Its impossible to that especially when Ruby is 80% perl.