Following on from a discussion about token separation in Python today, one of my colleagues put forward the idea of employing the ASCII bell character (^G) to be used for token separation within Perl scripts. Not one to be encouraged, I have written the following code which does just that, employs the ASCII bell character for token separation within Perl scripts.

#!/usr/bin/perl

BEGIN{local$/;open+F,$0;$_=<F>;tr/\007/;/;s/(?!:\n)BEGIN{[^\n]+}(?!:\n
+)//;eval;exit}

use strict^G

my @array = ( 'Hello', 'World!' )^G
print "@array\n"^G

exit 0^G
[download]

While not a replacement for Filter::Simple, this code does provide a working proof-of-concept and offers yet another way by which I can have fun with my colleagues during code reviews :-)

 

perl -le 'print+unpack("N",pack("B32","00000000000000000000001001000110"))'