[NBLUG/talk] I hate perl. :-)

[Chris Palmer]

William Tracy writes:

> Nice. :-) I'm not familiar with the curly brace syntax you used, which
> probably means I need to read some more.

Which curly brace syntax?  There is the map expression:

    print map { $_ . "\n" } sort keys %ngrms;

map's first argument can be a subroutine reference ("coderef" in Perl
terms), and literal subs can be used where references are called for.
The sub literal

    { $_ . "\n" }

simply concatenates its first argument with "\n"; and in Perl land, the
value of a subroutine call is the value of the last expression evaluated
in the sub, unless there is an explicit return statement.

Unfortunately, { ... } can also denote a literal hashref.  :\  From the
perldoc for map:

> "{" starts both hash references and blocks, so "map { ..." could be
> either the start of map BLOCK LIST or map EXPR, LIST.  Because perl
> doesn't look ahead for the closing "}" it has to take a guess at which
> its dealing with based what it finds just after the "{". Usually it
> gets it right, but if it doesn't it won't realize something is wrong
> until it gets to the "}" and encounters the missing (or unexpected)
> comma. The syntax error will be reported close to the "}" but you'll
> need to change something near the "{" such as using a unary "+" to
> give perl some help:

Oh, the pain.

> >The obvious performance improvement is to turn the recursion into
> >iteration.  This version is very slow.
> 
> I thought about that a little. The performance I got was almost as
> fast as the console can print I/O, but that doesn't mean there's no
> room for improvement. :-)

I see you only tried it with arguments of, say, 5 letters or less.  Try
getting the anagrams of the word "insiginificant".  ;)


-- 
https://www.eff.org/about/staff/#chris_palmer

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