Seeing s0ttle's recent post got me thinking.

And the thought crossed my mind:

What's the most TIMTOWTDI thing you can do? ie, what action can you perform in Perl in the most distinct ways?

Eg, string concatenation: 

$concat = $a.$b

$concat = "$a$b"

$concat = join '', $a, $b;

$concat = sprintf("%s%s",$a,$b); # silly

$concat =~ s/.*/$a$b/s;          # sillier!

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That's 5 distinct (some slightly silly) ways to do it.

Get your thinking caps on... And no cheating! :-) - eg, manipulating $a and $b first so you can then feed them into another function.

Is this golf? Na, it's Perl Pooltm

cLive ;-)

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Re: The most TIMTOWTDI thing you can do
by blakem (Monsignor) on Oct 23, 2001 at 10:04 UTC
    Just off the top of my head: 
    1.) ($concat = $a) .= $b;

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    perhaps more will follow. (and they did....) 
    2.) $" = $b; @_ = ($a,undef); $concat = "@_";
3.) do { $concat .= $_ for (split(//))} for ($a,$b);
4.) my %a = ($a => $b); $concat = join'',each %a;
5.) $concat =~ s//$a/; $concat =~ s/$/$b/;
6.) $concat = <<"EOF"; chomp($concat);
    $a$b
    EOF
7.) $concat = `echo -n "$a$b"`;  # for safe values of $a and $b
8.) $concat = glob("{$a}{$b}");  # not Taint safe... will choke on met
+achars...
9.) ($concat) = ("$a$b" =~ /(.*)/);

And finally, everyones favorite Perl6 construct...
10.) $concat = $a _ $b;

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    Update: Ok, now I get it... you want us to pick a simple operation and try to find $MAX+1 ways to do it, not necessarily just find other ways to do a concat. In that case, I'll set the original $MAX rather high by pointing at Adding 2 + 2, which ties perl-based-dynamic-webpage-templating-systems for the most most "ways to do it."

    Update2: Added a few more to the list...

    -Blake

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      10.) $concat = $a _ $b;

      OK, I'll stick out my neck.
      Where can I RTFM on this _ operator(?)?

      f--k the world!!!!
      /dev/world has reached maximal mount count, check forced.

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Re: The most TIMTOWTDI thing you can do
by one4k4 (Hermit) on Oct 23, 2001 at 23:36 UTC
    Similar to option 5 of yours, I tried:
    #!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

my $a = "Foo";
my $bar = "bar";
$a =~ s/(.*)/$1$bar/;

print $a;

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    There's always:
    1) Create insert sql statements
2) Insert into a table
3) select col1+col2 from table
4) fetchrow
5) print

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    :)

    _14k4 - perlmonks@poorheart.com (www.poorheart.com)
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Re: The most TIMTOWTDI thing you can do
by demerphq (Chancellor) on Oct 25, 2001 at 15:32 UTC
    Ok, heres a couple of strange ones: 
    #Yabadabadoo!
my $cat=unpack("A*",pack("A*A*",$s_a,$s_b));

# Serious overkill
use Tie::Handle::Scalar;
my $cat2;
tie *FH, 'Tie::Handle::Scalar', \$cat2;
print FH $s_a,$s_b;

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    BTW its bad practice to use the variables $a and $b. They have special meaning to sort and you can get weird errors from them.

    Yves / DeMerphq
    --
    Have you registered your Name Space?

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