Re: Mnemonic Devices for Perl Programming

[George_Sherston]

I hadn't thought of this, but it's quite a useful thing to do. I have to look up my Perl 5 pocket reference every time I do seek because I have a mental block abt whether the position comes before or after the whence (somehow it makes more sense that it shd come after, actually)... the trouble is, I can't actually think up a snappy mnenomic for FPW. The best I cd do was appropriate for foulmouthed people who don't like accountants, viz **** Price Waterhouse. The asterisks are fine because I know the filehandle comes first ;-). But perhaps the process of looking for a mnenomic will break my blockage and I'll be able to remember anyhow.

§ George Sherston

[YuckFoo]

If inclined, one could write a reverse acronymer. With Perl and a word list one could find mnemonics like:

seek frozen panda waffles
seek fattened pizza witches
seek fierce psychedelic wives

I never cared for 'Every good boy does fine'. Maybe I can lobby for 'Extinct goats burn dry footballs'?

YuckFoo

#!/usr/bin/perl

   use strict;

   my ($string, $num) = @ARGV;
   my ($DICT) = '/usr/share/dict/words';

   my (%words, @chs, $ch, $line, $i);

   @chs = split('', $string);

   for $ch (@chs) {
      if (!defined($words{$ch})) { $words{$ch} = []; }
   }

   if (!open(IN, $DICT)) { print STDERR "\nError:$DICT\n\n"; exit; }

   while (chomp ($line = <IN>)) {
      $ch = substr($line, 0, 1);
      if (defined($words{$ch})) { push (@{$words{$ch}}, $line); }
   }

   for ($i = 0; $i < $num; $i++) {
      for $ch (@chs) {
         print "$words{$ch}->[rand(@{$words{$ch}})] ";
      }
      print "\n";
   }

[theorbtwo]

Hm, "Seek Fortune, Passion, and Wisdom"?

Thanks,
James Mastros,
Just Another Perl Scribe