in reply to Fore!!! (was The Perl Review)
in thread The Perl Review

How about 48? 
sub h{
#        1         2         3         4
#23456789_123456789_123456789_123456789_12345678
($_,$s)=@_;y/A-Z/:-T/;$s=36*$s-48+ord for/./g;$s
}

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PS If you read the problem statement carefully, there is a 1 character answer: 
sub convert_0 {
0
}

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tilly ducks

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Re: Re (tilly) 2: Fore!!! (was The Perl Review)
by blakem (Monsignor) on Feb 02, 2002 at 00:14 UTC
    The y/// is very sneaky, but why play games with that $s? If you want a 0, see if one of $% $- $? or $[ work for you. Here it is shortened to 43 chars and as an added bonus, its now strict compatible. 
    #        1         2         3         4
#23456789_123456789_123456789_123456789_1234
$_=pop;y/A-Z/:-T/;$?=36*$?-48+ord for/./g;$?

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    -Blake

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[d/l]
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      I wrote it as a function.

      The function should be usefully callable multiple times.

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      Since you're well past my meagre 59 (from the use.perl thread), I might as well show it: 
      $_=shift;y/0-9A-Z/\0-#/;(s/.//,($a*=36)+=ord)while length
      Yes, no output-- the game rules were unclear that way, too. Using your tricks I can get down to -- 43. 
      $_=pop;y/0-9A-Z/\0-#/;($a*=46)+=ord for/./g
      If only the null byte were legal in y///, then the above could become 42... 
      -- jhi
[reply]
        Assuming that 46 is a typo... 
        ($a*=36)+=ord   # 13 chars
$a=$a*36+ord    # 12 chars

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        But as you say, the rules are rather murky, so its tough to judge what qualifies as a solution and what doesn't.

        -Blake

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Re: Re (tilly) 2: Fore!!! (was The Perl Review)
by jackdied (Monk) on Feb 02, 2002 at 10:06 UTC
    Could someone brief me on the y/// syntax? I took a look in man perlre, and tried stepping through it in the debugger - both were futile.

    -jackdied

[reply]
      y is a function which is explained in perlop. What it does is substitutes for any character in one list, the corresponding charater on another list.

      What I did was use ord and chr to figure out what the ASCII representation of 9 was, and what came right after that. Then I used tr to move the range A-Z so that they came right after the range 0-9, so that I could convert any digit into a number just by taking ord and subtracting off the ord of 0.

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In Section Meditations