This probably doesn't present much of a challenge, but I thought I'd post 
it since it's the first time I've ever really grokked Perl golf.

A coworker (non-programmer) has been taking a course in C and asked me to 
help out with a program that takes a list of names through input, and 
print them back out when finished.  Since I don't know C, I thought I'd 
show her how it could be done in Perl.  Then something weird clicked in 
my brain, and I began shaving my original script down, character by 
character, from 201 characters (formatted and commented) to 77.

My version takes a list of names in 'first m last' (e.g. "Larry J Wall") 
format, and appends the name to a file in 'last first m' format.  
The script ends when it does not receive input in the correct format.

Here's what I came up with...


#!/usr/bin/perl

open(N,">>names");while(<>){last if!/(\w+) (\w) (\w+)/;print N"$3\t$1\t$2\n"}


It can be brought down to 71 characters by shortening the filename 
and replacing the tabs with spaces, but I thought I'd go for an output 
with a tad bit of formatting.  :)

joecamel