Very nice! And very original! So simple, and yet, so confusing!
Let's see if I can dissect it a bit:
$a=q-q=a$
The first line declares $a as a variable, and assigns it a string, using the q operator
with "-" as a delimiter. The following string:
q=a$
Cal Henderson
Techincal Director
Emap Digital New Projects
e: cal.henderson@emap.com
t: 020 7868 7543
m: 07899 835995
no unsolicted commercial email, ok!
is what is used as the pool of letters to write the program's output, "just another Perl hacker".
Then you've got the closing "-" delimiter, followed by the ";" closing out that statement. The next
bit is the fun part:
$b=59;
while('64aa22632f626f63913d8f3199583a6571c82d227fe107420' =~ /(..)/g)
{
$b += -100 + hex $1;
print((split(//,$a))[$b]);
}
$b is initialized with the value 59, and the while statement executes a regex search on
the string 64aa22632f626f63913d8f3199583a6571c82d227fe107420 which basically
grabs every two characters in that string, and stores them to the special variable $1.
Inside the for loop, the value of $b is augmented using the following logic:
- find the decimal value of the hexadecimal number contained in $1
- subtract 100 from it.
- add that number to the existing value of $b
So, from the start, $b==59, the regex grabs the hexadecimal number "64", converts it to
100 in decimal, subtracts 100 from it, and adds the value to $b, resulting in the value
59.
The next bit is interesting. The split operator is called on the big string contained in
$a, splitting it by '', thus creating a big array composed of each individual character
in the string, including spaces. [$b] is appended after the parenthesized split
statement, thus turning the current value of $b into an array index, plucking the letter
in that position out of the temporary array created by the split statement, and sending
it to the print statement.
Perhaps I over analyzed this one, but I had fun taking it apart and looking at it's components!
++iamcal!
higle
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[d/l]
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Hate to nit, but "Techincal Director" ? :)
I don't normally point out this kind of thing,
but since it's being used as a char pool... | [reply] |
urgh, my spelling sucks.
but in any case, my name's cal so i'm a techin-cal director :)
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