I was initially thinking about a module that would generate and execute every possible piece of Perl code when it was loaded. Such a module would be very useful, because once you loaded it, you wouldn't have to actually run your program; it would already have done whatever it was that you wanted.

As a first cut, I wrote:

   $s = "a";  while (length($s) < 100) { eval $s; $s++ }
[download]

realizing that this wasn't going to be what I wanted, because it doesn't generate any code with spaces or punctuation, but I thought it might be fun, at least as a joke. It looks like it is going to take a long time to execute, so I ran it with some fear that it might crash my machine or do something else bad.

But actually it executes rather quickly, and nothing bad happens. As I said, it was not the disaster I expected.

Can you predict the results?

---

---

• Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
• Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:

  <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>

• Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
• Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.