in reply to Math::MagicSquare::Generator

(To be uploaded to CPAN soon)
Did you miss Math::MagicSquare, already in the cpan? How is yours different? Can you just send patches to the original author or take it over instead? I don't see why we need two Magic Square generators in the CPAN!

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

Update: Argh. I could swear that when I first looked at Math::MagicSquare, that it was both a generator and a checker, because I noted it for potential material for a column. My mistake.

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Re: Re: Math::MagicSquare::Generator
by Juerd (Abbot) on Jan 27, 2002 at 22:08 UTC
    I made Math::MagicSquare::Generator last night, just because I couldn't sleep and couldn't stop thinking about magic squares. Years ago, we had an assignment at school to create a simple 3x3 magic square. That hounted me for weeks. After several weeks, I gave my teacher a piece of paper with an 11x11 magic square and he was impressed. Last night, I created a 5x5 magic square in my head, with no paper. While doing that, I realised I was thinking in terms of Perl code. I then wrote a module called Math::MagicSquare (on my laptop - no Internet connection (yes, the same laptop that has a 802.11b connection, but the Internet connection was down :)) in one go. The next morning, I checked CPAN to see if there already was a module. And there was - Just like you did, I thought it could generate and check, and I was kind of disappointed that I had re-invented a wheel. Its source was a mess, so I decided to not read, but use the code. Reading the documentation gave me the answer: it was just a checker. I chose to name my module after what it does, hoping the difference would be obvious - I renamed it to Math::MagicSquare::Generator, added documentation and uploaded it to CPAN after checking thoroughly if a module already existed.

    We both made the same mistake, and perhaps Math::MagicSquare::Checker would have been a better name for the existing Math::MagicSquare module, but it's too late for that now. 

    2;0 juerd@ouranos:~$ perl -e'undef christmas'
Segmentation fault
2;139 juerd@ouranos:~$

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