http://qs321.pair.com?node_id=137638

#!c:\perl\perl.exe -w use strict; my $A="a";for(0..285074){$A++;}print"$A";

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Re: First JAPH - Spell perl in two hundred and eighty five thousand and seventy four easy steps
by Veachian64 (Scribe) on Jan 10, 2002 at 07:34 UTC
    Corollary 1: $A="a";for(0..176858){$A++;}print"$A";
      Combining those I can convert 'japh' into 'perl' in a mere 108216 steps.....
      % perl -e '$\="japh";$\++for 0..108215;print' perl

      -Blake

Re: First JAPH - Spell perl in two hundred and eighty five thousand and seventy four easy steps
by VSarkiss (Monsignor) on Jan 10, 2002 at 05:36 UTC

    You have a picket-fence problem: it's actually 285,075 iterations. ;-)

Re: First JAPH - Spell perl in 285074 easy steps
by jmcnamara (Monsignor) on Jan 10, 2002 at 18:47 UTC

    Clever idea. :-)

    In reply to juerd's golf (28 chars):     perl -e '$\=a;$\++for-74..285e3;print'

    --
    John.

Re: First JAPH - Spell perl in two hundred and eighty five thousand and seventy four easy steps
by Juerd (Abbot) on Jan 10, 2002 at 16:57 UTC
    Haha! ++! Great one!

    Nice piece of code for a game of golf too...
    # First attempt # 1 2 3 #23456789012345678901234567890 $a=a;$a++for 0..285074;print$a # Second attempt (cheating :P) print'perl'

    2;0 juerd@ouranos:~$ perl -e'undef christmas' Segmentation fault 2;139 juerd@ouranos:~$

      # 1 2 #234567890123456789012345678 $\=z;$\++for 0..285049;print
      Faster, too ;-)

      update
      Cheating: \:->>
      # 1 2 #2345678901234567890123456 $\=z;$\++for z..perk;print
       _  _ _  _  
      (_|| | |(_|><
       _|   
      
        So then, if we really want to cheat:
        # 1 #234567890123456 print++($_=perk)
Re: First JAPH - Spell perl in two hundred and eighty five thousand and seventy four easy steps
by Starky (Chaplain) on Jan 10, 2002 at 06:09 UTC
    So simple it's brilliant! I laughed myself silly.
Re: First JAPH - Spell perl in two hundred and eighty five thousand and seventy four easy steps
by pokemonk (Scribe) on Jan 12, 2002 at 07:11 UTC
    I find this really amazing, but i can't figure out why it happens. can someone please explain?

    pokmon
      From perlop:

        The auto-increment operator has a little extra builtin magic to it. If you increment a variable that is numeric, or that has ever been used in a numeric context, you get a normal increment. If, however, the variable has been used in only string contexts since it was set, and has a value that is not the empty string and matches the pattern /^[a-zA-Z]*[0-9]*$/, the increment is done as a string, preserving each character within its range, with carry:

          print ++($foo = '99'); # prints '100'
          print ++($foo = 'a0'); # prints 'a1'
          print ++($foo = 'Az'); # prints 'Ba'
          print ++($foo = 'zz'); # prints 'aaa'

        The auto-decrement operator is not magical.

      -Blake

      #!/usr/bin/perl use strict; my $theword = @ARGV[0]; my $A='a'; FINDIT: for (0..99999999){ $A++; if ($A eq "$theword") {print "$_\n"; last FINDIT; } }
        Wow. That can take a really long time to count. This little bit o' code is much faster.
        #!/usr/bin/perl -w # Convert pseudo-base26 number (digits: a-z) to decimal # really intended to find the ending number needed in # the for loop for any given string to be used my $num = 0; my $char = "a"; my $answer = 0; until ($char eq "aa") { $equiv{$char}=$num; $num++; $char++; } print "Enter your lowercase string: "; chomp($string = <STDIN>); @strArray=reverse(split(//,$string)); for ($i = 0; $i < @strArray; $i++) { $answer += ($equiv{$strArray[($i)]} * (25 ** $i)); } print --$answer;
      hi pokemonk;

      In order to get an idea of how the word 'perl' gets printed, you may want to modify the code as follows:

      #!c:\perl\perl.exe -w use strict; my $A="a";for(0..285074){$A++; print"$A";}
      That is, you place the 'print "$A"' statement inside the loop. To see what what happens when, say, 1000 characters are printed, you stop the loop by pressing Ctr 'C' (if you're using Windows).

      kiat
Re: First JAPH - Spell perl in two hundred and eighty five thousand and seventy four easy steps
by /dev/null (Chaplain) on Sep 11, 2002 at 18:07 UTC
    Great script!! It gave me plenty of pseudo-base 26 fun. The number is incremented exponentially as the number of characters increases. i.e. devnull in base 26 is:
     ((4*26**6) + (5*26**5) + (22*26**4) + (14*26**3) + (21*26**2) + (12*26**1) + (12*26**0))