Catalyst Art

Perl: Strengths and Weaknesses
The reasons to use Perl are many, but there are also many roadblocks that have kept it out of production use at many companies. Operations and system support teams were likely the first people to use Perl in production. Here’s why:

Defined Support Structure vs. Volunteer Support
Management Approval or Lack Thereof
Rapid [...]

One of the most forgotten functions in Perl is the ‘tr‘ or translate function.
I say forgotten, because other than changing the case of letters from upper to lower, most programmers don’t think much of the ‘tr‘ function. By definition:

tr/SEARCHLIST/REPLACEMENTLIST/[c][d][s]
y/SEARCHLIST/REPLACEMENTLIST/[c][d][s]

This function translates all occurrences of the characters found in the search list to the corresponding character [...]

Real World Perl I

Those of you who have ever taken a class in programming, know that many of the class assignments seem to have no real-world applications. The assignment below is one that solved a real problem quickly and easily.

The Problem

We need to create a list of words for a computer game. The words should [...]