It's definitely a fractal curve. It's just so long since I did fractal things, I don't remember what people were calling these them.
String rewriting is all in The Science of Fractal Images, ed Peitgen & Saupe (Springer-Verlag, 1991, ISBN: 0387966080). Of course, they were using an awkward Pascal-like pseudocode language with no regular expressions ...
Here's at least part of the famous snowflake. I think I changed three lines:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use integer;
my $depth = 4;
my $start = '_/_\_/_'; # _ = forward, / = left, \ = right
my $fractal = $start;
$fractal =~ s/_/$start/og for ( 0 .. $depth );
$fractal =~ s/_/0 0.8 rlineto /g;
$fractal =~ s,/,60 rotate ,g;
$fractal =~ s,\\,240 rotate ,g;
print '%!', "\n", '0.1 setlinewidth 500 100 moveto ', $fractal,
'stroke showpage', "\n";
Now what would be really cool would be a Perl routine that would parse ASCII-art axioms and production rules, and generate the fractal. My free time is not that copious.
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