flee@cs.psu.edu (Felix Lee) (02/05/91)
Dale Worley wonders: > Is there a non-trivial Perl program that consists entirely of > punctuation marks? Well, I can't think of a way to write a loop with only punctuation. Worse, I can't find a way of generating output. This is Perl's fatal flaw: it requires you to use alphabetic characters. True terseness lies in hieroglyphic programming languages. But if you'll allow the "-p" flag, here's "uniq": #!/usr/bin/perl -p $: = $_; /^$__$/ && ($_ = ''); $__ = $:; If you'll allow preprocessed input, here's a (very slow) spell checker. #!/usr/bin/perl -p /^-$/ ? (++$[, $_='') : $[ ? (/^$/ || $_{$_}) && ($_ = '') : ($_{$_}++, $_ = ''); Name it "spckrm" and use the following script: #!/bin/sh (cat /usr/dict/words echo '-' perl -pe 'tr/A-Z/a-z/;$_=join("\n",split(/[^a-z]+/))."\n"' ${1+"$@"} ) | spckrm | sort -u This is only scratching the surface of wordless Perl. More complex things are surely possible. -- Felix Lee flee@cs.psu.edu
brister@decwrl.dec.com (James Brister) (02/06/91)
On 4 Feb 91 19:20:24 GMT, flee@cs.psu.edu (Felix Lee) said:
[ three Perl programs that consist entirely of punctuation marks ]
It seems to me time for an Obfuscated Perl competition....
James
--
James Brister brister@decwrl.dec.com
DEC Western Software Lab., Palo Alto, CA {uunet,sun,pyramid}!decwrl!bristerchip@tct.uucp (Chip Salzenberg) (02/07/91)
According to brister@decwrl.dec.com (James Brister):
>It seems to me time for an Obfuscated Perl competition....
"Obfuscated Perl" is redundant. (But I love it anyway.)
--
Chip Salzenberg at Teltronics/TCT <chip@tct.uucp>, <uunet!pdn!tct!chip>
"Most of my code is written by myself. That is why so little gets done."
-- Herman "HLLs will never fly" Rubinbob@MorningStar.Com (Bob Sutterfield) (02/07/91)
TECO used to be the language I used as an example of what modem line noise looks like, then Sendmail. Now it's perl. That's progress, I guess.