[TAG] An article series I wonder what happened to...

[Benjamin A. Okopnik]

On Tue, Jun 13, 2006 at 10:12:17AM -0500, clarjon1 wrote:
> Hey, ben, as to that one idea, with the spaceship and all?  what if
> their language could be translated by decoding it with some perl
> modules?  u know, like with morse and i dunno, mebbe uuencode or
> something?  a few different formats maybe?  just an idea to throw past
> you...

It's a cute idea - thanks! - but then I'd have to define their language.
Hmmm... maybe it's similar to Klingon, or Igpay-Atinlay... :)

> PS: I wrote my first perl program! it's very simple, based mostly on
> one of the things in the perl tutorial, and it searches through lines
> in a file for the criteria...

Ah, good old "perl -wne'print if /criterion/' file.txt". :)

> I use it to keep track of appointments and important stuff.  Right now
> i have to use a text editor to add stuff, but I'm sure I can get an
> input worked in eventually...
> I used that example of how to call up a filename, and then search for
> keywords.  Works for me thus far!

Which Perl tutorial is this? There are a lot of them out there. As to a
reading and writing the sort of scheduler you're talking about, there's
a little complexity involved; if you want to write to a file, you need
to learn about the 'open' call and filehandles. Be careful swimming in
those waters; if you're not careful, you'll get hooked and end up as a
Perl programmer. Sure, people will throw lots of money at you, you'll be
able to do what you want in a tenth of the time that you used to spend,
and you'll have lots of fun, but who wants to be bothered with all that
stuff? :)


* Ben Okopnik * Editor-in-Chief, Linux Gazette * http://linuxgazette.net *