Very nice! You've got me singing along to your poem.
One suggestion; if you turn on warnings with -w instead of use warnings, your poem will run under 5.005 too. :) | [reply] [Watch: Dir/Any] [d/l] [select] |
I'm curious... Could you share your thought process as you wrote this?
I've looked at Writing highly obfuscated code in Perl, but most of the tips* found in that node are not demonstrated in this snippet. Some obfuscations demonstrate a certain level of style and creativity; yours is one example.
* I would say most of those tips, used alone and without creativity, would in fact be nothing more than cheap tricks. Not unlike playing a musical instrument well technically, but without making any music.
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Well, the code actually wasn't intended to be obfuscated. I've never had much of an interest in writing obfuscated perl, and haven't read the node you mentioned. (Although I expect I will as soon as I'm done posting my reply....)
I started with the mere idea that I wanted to write "My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean" as a perl poem, and just tried my hardest to force the poem to be syntactically valid. I will admit that it turned out better than I expected. Here's a collection of thoughts that might help to explain how it got into its final form.
I started with:
my $bonnie = "lies_over_the_ocean";
my $bonnie = "lies_over_the_sea";
my $bonnie = "lies_over_the_ocean";
Of course, the compiler complained about multiple declarations of $bonnie within the same scope, so I merely added the requisite braces to make each $bonnie declaration fall into a new scope.
The 0; before the first bring_back() is simply a no-op. It's there because the actual song contains the word "oh" at that point.
I noticed that the words "bring back" are used repeatedly throughout the song, and made an analogy between lyrics and code. As a rule, oft-used pieces of code should be stuck within a function. Hence, I created a bring_back() function and called it repeatedly.
It just "worked out" to have nested calls to bring_back(), since that fits the flow of the actual song. The calls to bring_back() have the added advantage of setting up new scopes such that I can declare $bonnie again.
The 0,'s within the function calls continue the tradition set up earlier; they use the number 0 to represent the phonetic "oh"'s that are present in the real song, while keeping the code syntactically valid.
I called each bring_back() with whatever arguments fit the song.
At this point, I created an empty sub bring_back {} that did nothing, and thought my work was done.
I then decided it would be nice for the poem to actually output something, and decided that bring_back() should be the place to do it.
The obvious problem was getting the output to print only once, since bring_back() gets called 7 times.
I decided I'd use the number of arguments passed to bring_back() as the criteria for printing, and simply toyed with bring_back()'s return value until I got a unique number of arguments passed (5) on the last call. | [reply] [Watch: Dir/Any] [d/l] [select] |