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These are some answers to the Week 166 of the Perl Weekly Challenge organized by Mohammad S. Anwar.

Task 1: Hexadecimal Words

As an old systems programmer, whenever I needed to come up with a 32-bit number, I would reach for the tired old examples like 0xDeadBeef and 0xC0dedBad. I want more!

Write a program that will read from a dictionary and find 2- to 8-letter words that can be “spelled” in hexadecimal, with the addition of the following letter substitutions:

• o ⟶ 0 (e.g., 0xf00d = “food”)
• l ⟶ 1
• i ⟶ 1
• s ⟶ 5
• t ⟶ 7

You can use your own dictionary or you can simply open ../../../data/dictionary.txt (relative to your script’s location in our GitHub repository) to access the dictionary of common words from Week #161.

Optional Extras (for an 0xAddedFee, of course! * Limit the number of “special” letter substitutions in any one result to keep that result at least somewhat comprehensible. (0x51105010 is an actual example from my sample solution you may wish to avoid!)*

Many people already have codes like

use strict;
use warnings;

and so on at the top of each script they write. For scripts which I don't intend to publish anywhere, I have a module (which I accidentally called Z not knowing there was already a module of the same name on CPAN), which switches on lots of things at once just by saying

use Z;

The top bit goes like this:

If you want to challenge yourself on programming, especially on Perl and/or Raku, go to https://perlweeklychallenge.org, code the latest challenges, submit codes on-time (by GitHub or email).

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My coding momentum is a bit low.

Reflections on the codes I have written:

#095

Task 1: Palindrome Number
TMTOWTDI. On this seemly and actually simple task, I chose to compare the digit one by one.

Task 2: Demo Stack
A bit smell of laziness. I did not provide functions when stack is empty and pop() or min() is called.

#096

Task 1: Reverse Words
A lesson on extra-white space. Oppositely but as lack of caution as a sin, this morning (GMT+8) I found I have forgotten a newline for my code for #105 Task 1.

Task 2: Edit Distance
That was a standard computer science exercise. I was astounded by reading Mr Abigail's blog on the approach on saving memory space.

#097

Task 1: Caesar Cipher
Trivial.

During the last years it became fashionable to rag on object oriented programming and a decade ago I would join the choir. Hack, when I started with Perl I despised the bloat and inefficiency of many corporate smelling *coughjava* systems and preached the light weight and foreward thinking way that real hackers travel. In this miniseries I want to write why I changed my tune [part one], the best way (IMO) to use OOP [part two] and why inheritance (incl. roles and templates) and delegation or not helpful features (in contrast to polymorphism) [part three]. Maybe there will be more about rating Perl OO features and modules.

These are some answers to the Week 165 of the Perl Weekly Challenge organized by Mohammad S. Anwar.

This week, Task 1 and part of Task 2 relate to Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). I’d been using SVG a very long time ago and certainly didn’t remember any of the details. So, in my first blog relating to PWC 165, I stated that I didn’t have time for that and covered only the part of the challenge not related to SVG. I also said that, in the event that I find some time over the weekend, I might come back and fulfill the SVG part. I thought at the time that this was rather unlikely, but I was finally able to cover the SVG part, at least in Raku.

Task 1: Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG)

Here are solutions to this weeks challenges from the Perl Weekly Challenge.

You can find my full code on Github

Nth root

You are given positive numbers $N and $k.

Write a script to find out the $Nth root of $k.

The solution

I decided that I would not go the easy way this week and just use the power function ** i.e. return $k**(1/$N).

Instead for integer values of $N, solve this with only using the simple mathematical operators +, /, *, -, <, >

To do this we will use a divide and conquer solution, starting at the two ends of the interval we calculate the values of x^N, and then iterate reducing the interval in half - choosing the interval where the value of x^N is less than k at the left hand end & x^N is greater than k.

To do this we store the value of the ends of the interval as l and r respectively and computer the Nth power of each (ln & rn).

If you’ve read Curtis “Ovid” Poe’s articles on the declarative framework for Tau Station Link and Link, you are undoubtedly aware of many of the benefits this style of programming can bring. It decouples the “what” from the “how”, encourages discrete functions and prevents the OO trap of “god objects”. The result is software that is easy to test, robust and very flexible. Inserting steps, reording steps etc… are done much easier and more clearly than trying to figure this out in 300 lines of imperative code with four to six level deep if-else chains with for loops mixed in for good fun. However, the framework is tightly coupled to the game in spots and has a few other issues that make it not ready for general use.

I've been asked by a couple of Perl groups to give a virtual presentation. Writing new material that would only have been shown once is a lot of work for a small reward.

But, I just happened to be cleaning out my virtual junk drawer, and stumbled across my "half my life with Perl" slide deck that I had presented at OSCON 2013. Most of the stuff is timeless, as it describes Perl's first 25 years, and my second 25 years and how I influenced Perl, and Perl influenced me, and how my company (Stonehenge) was changed by all of this, and in some ways even changed all of this as well.

Please tune in at 6pm Pacific Time (currently UTC-7) on Monday the 22nd to watch it live. I will try to read the comments quickly at the end of the show and answer any questions as well. The video will remain permanently on Youtube at the address below.

Live link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VMz7GINc2E

Please share!

These are some answers to the Week 165 of the Perl Weekly Challenge organized by Mohammad S. Anwar.

Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a few of days from now (on May 22, 2022 at 24:00). This blog post offers some (partial) solutions to this challenge, please don’t read on if you intend to complete the challenge on your own.

Here are solutions to this weeks challenges from the Perl Weekly Challenge.

You can find my full code on Github

Task 1: FUSC sequence

The sequence defined as below:

fusc(0) = 0
fusc(1) = 1
for n > 1:
when n is even: fusc(n) = fusc(n / 2),
when n is odd:  fusc(n) = fusc((n-1)/2) + fusc((n+1)/2)

Solution

I will show you 4 versions of the code below - they essentially non-cached/cached versions of recursive (naive) code to get an individual element, and a non-recursive version to compute the whole sequence.

On behalf of the Dancer Core Team, version 0.301000 is now available. This is not the release we envisioned; it is missing some things we'd like to have finished, but it does have a couple of new things worth pointing out:

• A new keyword, request_data, to get the entire deserialized body of the request
• A new Cookbook recipe for showing how to dynamically enable/disable modules and routes at runtime
• Numerous doc and bug fixes.

Check out the changelog for a complete list of changes.

The big thing worth pointing out is App::Cmd, which is now not a requirement of Dancer2. A new version of App::Cmd was released with a minimum version requirement of Perl 5.20. We aim to support Dancer2 back to Perl 5.10, which was no longer possible with the current App::Cmd. We had several options to consider in moving forward, and the one we chose was this:

If you're using XS and C in your Perl module, you might have to worry about memory errors. There are tools like valgrind or memory sanitizer which you can use of course:

valgrind perl -I blib/lib -I blib/arch ./mytestscript

or if your problems are even more serious ones like segmentation fault errors you can run Perl under a debugger like gdb:

gdb perl
% run -I blib/lib -I blib/arch ./mytestscript

However, it might be worth noting some "easy" ways to catch memory errors which actually catch a lot of things.

The first thing is setting the variable to 0 after freeing:

 free (result);
 result = 0;

This prevents you from using the variable again accidentally after freeing, although free (0) is actually not an error, so it doesn't prevent you freeing it twice.

These are some answers to the Week 164 of the Perl Weekly Challenge organized by Mohammad S. Anwar.

Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a few of days from now (on May 15, 2022 at 24:00). This blog post offers some solutions to this challenge, please don’t read on if you intend to complete the challenge on your own.

Task 1: Prime Palindromes

Write a script to find all prime numbers less than 1000, which are also palindromes in base 10. Palindromic numbers are numbers whose digits are the same in reverse. For example, 313 is a palindromic prime, but 337 is not, even though 733 (337 reversed) is also prime.

Prime Palindromes in Raku

We use a data pipeline (chained method invocations) with two grep statements, one to keep palindromes and one to keep prime numbers. This leads to a fairly concise one-line solution:

say (1..^1000).grep({ $_ == .flip }).grep({.is-prime});

Twenty years ago today I released my first CPAN module: Fork::Queue.

Then there was a group of people supervising module names, and they advised me to move it under the Proc namespace and so it became Proc::Queue.

A couple of weeks before, a bug on one of my scripts had fork-bombed a production box. I barely remember the details now... just that my manager had a serious conversation with me about the incident.

Anyway, that forced me to write the module.

Something I remember for sure is the proud I was of it. How I had been able to replace several Perl builtins playing with the CORE::GLOBAL namespace in a (IMO) clever way!

Here are solutions to this weeks challenges from the Perl Weekly Challenge.

You can find my full code on Github

Task 1: Chinese zodiac

You are given a year $year.

The animal cycle: Rat, Ox, Tiger, Rabbit, Dragon, Snake, Horse, Goat, Monkey, Rooster, Dog, Pig.

The element cycle: Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, Water.

Additionally there is a two year cycle between Yin & Yang

This challenge is a relatively simple challenge - and one perl is well suited:

sub year_name {
  return join q( ),
    qw( Yang   Yin                             )[  $_[0]    %  2 ],
    qw( Metal  Water   Wood   Fire  Earth      )[ ($_[0]/2) %  5 ],
    qw( Monkey Rooster Dog    Pig   Rat   Ox
        Tiger  Rabbit  Dragon Snake Horse Goat )[  $_[0]    % 12 ];
}

I got this email from PAUSE just now:

Failed: PAUSE indexer report BKB/Go-Tokenize-0.01.tar.gz

     module : switch

It looks like it doesn't like this line of code containing Go keywords:

chan         else         goto         package      switch

These are some answers to the Week 163 of the Perl Weekly Challenge organized by Mohammad S. Anwar.

Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a few days from now (on May 8, 2022 at 24:00). This blog post offers some solutions to this challenge, please don’t read on if you intend to complete the challenge on your own.

Task 1: Sum Bitwise Operator

You are given list positive numbers, @n.

Write script to calculate the sum of bitwise & operator for all unique pairs.

Example 1:

Input: @n = (1, 2, 3)
Output: 3

Since (1 & 2) + (2 & 3) + (1 & 3) => 0 + 2 + 1 =>  3.

Example 2:

Folk's in the world of Perl have been making amazing efforts to blog more and even to produce video content. That's awesome! Keep it up!

Risking sounding like a mandatory training video from HR, I want to remind budding authors of some high level criteria you should review before completing a post:

• Does it welcome new people to Perl?
• Does it welcome people back to Perl?
• Does it lift, encourage and praise them?
• Is it respectful to people who's use case, experiences and journey with Perl is different to yours?
• Is it respectful of peoples lifestyle, politics, background, and differing lived experiences?
• Does it grow the Perl community and celebrate our diversity?
• Does it teach people something new about Perl?

The answer in all cases should be yes.

Here are some examples that aren't inspired by any specific post but are based on content or comments I have read.

Using system perl is stupid, it's not real perl

Back to school ...

Apology for the delay in monthly report, usually I get it released on first day of the month.

Last month was the shortest month of the year as you all know, so getting things done became relatively harder.

What is in store this time?

Well, there were two things that took away all the attentions.

500th edition of Perl Weekly newsletter

I have been a regular reader of the weekly newsletter for many years now. If you want regular dose of Perl news directly in your inbox every Monday then please do subscribe the newsletter. I joined the elite group of editors in May 2018, thanks to Gabor Szabo for giving me the opportunity. I had the honour to edit the 500th edition of the Perl Weekly newsletter. It feels nice and gives me sense of achievments.

Too fanboy/girl-ish, perhaps?

Yes, I'm well on-trend, by a couple of months. As you see, lockdown has made a hot mess of my blogging schedule. I count myself very fortunate that is the worst effect it's had on me, alongside the gaining of some mass.

WfH WARNING! Watch out for those caramel waffles! A single Stroopwaffle has enough calories to feed a hungry village for a day and are not a sustainable treatment for anxiety. Two kWh per packet, not a word of a lie.