Hello Monastery - long time, no see.

As the Brothers here grow old and gray (or grey, I suppose - TMTOWTDI), we must surely be contemplating the eternal.

Leading me to wonder this morning... What's a good regular expression for your tombstone?

Maybe:

die "Normal termination" if /life$/;

Share your best idea!

I've been working on an exercise to generate the English "Twelve days of Christmas song". So far, I've come up with the following:

for(<DATA>){s/%/ing/;$_=($i++?$i-1+print"
":a)." $_";print"On the $i",(st,nd,rd)[$i-1]||th," day of Christmas,
my true love gave to me:
",$t=$_.$t}__DATA__
partridge in a pear tree.
turtle doves and
French hens,
call% birds,
golden rings,
geese a-lay%,
swans a-swimm%,
maids a-milk%,
ladies danc%,
lords a-leap%,
pipers pip%,
drummers drumm%,
[download]

That generates the following text:

My script is 343 bytes, which is better than zip and tar+gzip but worse than gzip:

-rw-r--r--  1 john  john   294 May  1 13:29 12days.gz
-rw-r--r--  1 john  john   343 Apr 30 04:00 12days.pl
-rw-r--r--  1 john  john   370 May  1 13:30 12days.tar.gz
-rw-r--r--  1 john  john  2169 May  1 13:29 12days.txt
-rw-r--r--  1 john  john   439 May  1 13:30 12days.zip
[download]

Does anybody have a shorter solution? For simplicity's sake, I've limited the challenge to digits rather than written numbers.

                                                                           to my father, sure of his pardon :)

perl -le'$_=`perldoc -T perlfaq4`,s/^.*N;(.*?)E.*$/$1/s,print'
[download]

How:to:forget:when:I:was:young:
join ' had ', (glob'spr{a,e,i,o,u}ng')[2,4];
Now:I:get:in:the:middle:of:
join ' and ', (glob'Y{i,a}n{,g}')[0,-1];
and:I:remember:it:was:a:bang:
seek DATA,0,0;while(<DATA>){last if/DATA/;
chomp&&print/:/?(join$",split':',$_):eval,$/}
__DATA__
[download]

L*

(*)please do not reply with positivist comments about the exact first day of Spring: seasons always start in day 21: the notion is in my mind since..

The wise coder will never pipe grep into awk
For unneeded processes cause neighbours to talk.
The wise coder will never type cat file | foo
Unless they want a UUoCA too.
The wise coder will never discard output from backticks
As that displays ignorance of better tactics.
The wise coder won't shell out to grep, awk or sed
Since no JAPH would be seen doing that, dead.

perl -e'$_="Larry";while(++$_){print"\rPerl is $_";goto(MAGIC)if/Magic
+/}MAGIC:print"\n"';perl -v|perl -pe's\Perl\Magic\magic';perl -e'print
+"[Perl$^V] ";<STDIN>'
[download]

perl -v|perl -pe's\(?<=r)[l]\x\g;s\(?<=pe)r\\gi;s\p(e)\S$1\gi'
[download]

chomp and print join ',',  grep $_, (map length, split /[a,]/), "\n"
 while <DATA>;
__END__
a bug trapped inside
a paper lantern, arid 
aflutter, ablaze
[download]