Wow! Very interesting reading, you have provided, I like it much.
This task (printing the word, if it contains "a" and then the occurrences of "e") came up years ago in python programming class and some could't do it. I was just trying to show them how uncomplicated it was by taking my perl code and turning it into a one-liner. Guess I was trying to be cool. And that was it, it was saved on my hard drive and forgotten. Now, years later I found the one-liner, which looked like (obviously with different words):

perl -e '$c=0;@s=("anyone","cancel","declare","perlmonks");foreach(@s){if($s[$c]=~/a/){$n=()=$s[$c]=~/e/g;print"$s[$c]: $n\n";}$c++;}'
(135 strokes)

And I had to laugh. This didn't contain any really "perl-y" tricks (except for the regexp maybe), it was my original program without any whitespaces, and shorter variables. So in a few hours I got it down to

perl -e 'for('anyone','cancel','declare','perlmonks'){$i=()=/e/g;print"$_: $i\n"if(/a/);}'
(91 strokes)

And here I got stuck. But I enjoyed getting it shorter, and I knew it could be even shorter. So I posted it here, to see how far I was from the shortest solution. Now we have

perl -E'/a/&&say"$_: ".y/e//for anyone,cancel,declare,perlmonks'
(65 strokes)

And it might get shorter. I don't know.
Also, this isn't really a competition, more like, just me trying to improve my skills. I was curious how differently others might approach it.

PS. I never heard about code golf before, but thanks for introducing me to it, I might get into it with time :)

Regards, lunix

In reply to Re^2: Shorten this one-liner! by lunix
in thread Shorten this one-liner! by lunix

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.